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" The teachings of Christianity are to-day so familiar, they have
dominated our philosophy so powerfully and for so long a time, that it
is only with difficulty that we can realise their superhuman character.
To regain that notion we must for a moment tear ourselves from this
Christian world where we live, and mix once more with the Jewish and
pagan crowd to whom the apostles first preached the gospel. There,
without at first paying heed to the new teaching that is about to make
itself heard, we must listen to the chatter of the crowd as it surges
about us, and through the popular legends and the speculation of the
elite, strive to reach religious beliefs as the disciples of Jesus
encountered them. Then when the voice of these new teachers does reach
our ears we shall recapture something of that note of newness with
which their message seized on those who first heard it." [ ]
We may distinguish roughly three main religious influences in that
world into which Catholicism came. There were first of all the
religions associated with the culture of classic antiquity, of Greece
that is, and Rome. There were the religions which originated in the
pre-Roman culture of the Empire, Celtic religions in the West and --
much more important in the history of the Church -- the ancient
religions of the East. Of these last, one, by its nature a religion
apart, demands special treatment. It is the third of these main
religious currents -- the religion of the Jewish people.
The Jews were but a fraction of the Empire's huge population, and
outside that fraction flourished the amorphous thing we conveniently
label Paganism. On the surface Paganism presented, throughout the
Empire, the more or less uniform aspect of the Romano-Hellenic cults
which had become the fashionable thing with the expansion and
centralisation of the imperial system. But just as the older culture
and older social tradition survived beneath the new political
structure, so there survived too the older religious beliefs and
practices. The religion of any given city then, of any given family,
even of the individual, would present a curiously rich diversity in
which could be distinguished, strata by strata, the remains of more
than one religious development and conquest.
The Greek contribution to this world of religions was twofold. There
were the earlier beliefs, animistic and anthropomorphic which grew and
developed through centuries of whose history we know little or nothing,
and which are best known to us through the epic poetry. There were the
numerous beliefs and systems that grew up in reaction against this
primitive naturalistic religion.
The earlier religion saw a superhuman power at work in the play of
natural forces and their products. Trees, streams, sky and air, the
earth itself were reverenced as the effects of the superhuman, finally
identified with the superhuman, and as such personified and worshipped.
Some of these naturalistic gods were conceived as having human form;
and gradually, from out this vast number of the gods so conceived, a
few, absorbing the functions of the less important, came to be
considered as ruling, in a more or less ordered hierarchy, this
supernatural construction. With them were associated lesser gods -- the
deified achievements of humanity -- the heroes. With each god, demi-god
and hero went the appropriate myth, and to each was paid his due
worship. This cult was a public, community affair, a matter of ritual
acts. Sacrifices placated the divinity, oracles discovered its will,
and at times magic arts constrained it. Ritual acts were the affair of
the priests -- their sole function. Fixed dogmatic teaching there was
none; nor did these religions provide any sanctions for the morality of
conduct. "Doctrine mattered little. The ritual practices were the real
affair of religion. It was ritual that was of obligation, an obligation
generally of extreme urgency."
There was a vague belief in a future life that was the same for all
mankind, a few lucky descendants of the Olympian gods excepted; for
this future life was hardly conceived as a thing to be coveted. The
words Homer puts into the mouth of Achilles are but an expression of a
despair as widespread as the mythologies themselves: "Better to be the
most wretched slave on earth than among the dead to be the King of
all." In the heaven where dwelt the divinities of this unmoral,
anthropomorphic religion, life was the life of earth; and with human
virtues, human vices -- and among them the most human of all -- found
there their celestial counterpart. Violence, covetousness, treachery,
injustice and an anarchy of sex morality played their part in the life
of the divine patron as habitually, as unashamedly and as
unremorsefully as in the lives of the worst of his earthly clients.
With any development of intellectual life the growth of reaction
against such a religion could only be a matter of time. The mythology,
thanks to the gifted race's imagination and to its literary genius,
became at once the source and inspiration of all that was most
characteristic in the national life, and, accepted in its main lines
wherever the race spread, the basis of whatever unity it possessed. But
the effect of imaginative and artistic development was to humanise the
gods until they became indistinguishable from creatures, and presently,
for the intellectuals, little more than the playthings of the race's
brilliant fantasy. When to the early poets there succeeded the first
philosophers, and the later critical dramatic poetry, the inevitable
antagonism between Greek religion and the Greek intelligence began to
show rapidly. Zeus, Hera, Artemis, Apollo and Aphrodite; Furies,
Nymphs, Pan and the Satyrs could not forever dominate any human
intelligence; and the Greek intelligence was soon to show itself in a
strength and acuteness never since surpassed.
The first product of the reaction was the spread, side by side with the
ancient public religions, of new secret cults, open only to the
initiated, in which the dissatisfaction with the older cults'
puerilities and the newly-aroused intellectual speculation found
something of satisfaction. These were the Mystery Religions and the
Orphic cults.
The Mysteries were magnificently organised dramatic spectacles, dramas
in which were represented the most primitive of the myths, through
which -- and not through any dogmatic teaching or special esoteric
revelation -- the candidate was initiated into a new assurance of his
present acceptability to the god and of his future eternal happiness in
a world to come. He prepared himself for the event by ritual
purification in the sea or in the appointed river, by fasts and special
abstinences. He was sworn to secrecy; he offered the appointed
sacrifices; he was fed with the mysterious sacred food; and then, in
the night that followed, spectator of the sacred mysterious drama, he
became one with the blessed body of the elect.
The Orphic cults all developed about the same time: roughly, it is in
the sixth century before Christ that their first historical traces can
be found. Orphic religion is at once a mystery and a philosophy. Man is
a being in whom there works a dual principle. From the Titans, from
whose ashes he partly derives, he inherits a principle of evil. From
the god Dionysos, slain and devoured by the Titans -- the crime for
which they merited destruction-he inherits a principle that is good.
Whence the necessity for man to free himself from the evil element of
his nature, so that what is divine in him may triumph. This
emancipation is the object of the Orphic rites. They include repeated
purifications; sacrifices where no blood is shed; the dramatic
representation of the myth of the slaying of Dionysos, in which the
candidates devour the raw flesh of the bull in whose form he is
presented as being slain; and, finally, the revelation to the
newly-initiated of the infallible, sacred, saving formula which will
secure him safe passage through the nether world. The natural anxiety
for a happy future life finds an assurance; and with these theories of
man as a fallen god and of the saving rites of purification, the idea
of morality for the first time enters Greek religion. These teachings,
and the ceremonial effect of the mysteries' setting, made of the new
movement a formidable rival to the futile formalism which preceded
A more direct blow to its life was the criticism of the new moral
philosophy. "Never did people of so advanced a culture have so childish
a religion," says M. Cumont; and the culture was about to destroy that
religion for ever, as a force in the lives of that elite whose leisure
for thought makes it the arbiter of a people's destiny. In the wake of
this new religious movement, then, there followed a moralist criticism
of the old cults which mocked at the domestic absurdities of Olympus
and heaped on the Olympians the reproach of all the misery of the world
they were conceived as ruling. Belief in such gods is futile, a waste
of life, the greatest of follies. Such is the inevitable conclusion,
and if in Sophocles and Aeschylus the genius of poetry remained
conservatively loyal, in the plays of Euripides the new criticism found
an exponent as powerful and profound as his appeal was popular. The
moral problems of personal responsibility for which Orphic religion
offered a solution passed into the philosophical discussion of the day,
and became for a long time one of its most popular topics. Through the
personality of Socrates, and the art of Plato, moral philosophy bred a
new notion of righteous living and a noble idealism of life which,
owing nothing to the older religion's inspiration, could not, from its
very superiority to that religion's ideals, be anything else than a
force making for its destruction. The new philosophy offered to men a
better way; and if it led to an imitation in life of the divine, it did
so without the aid of the old beliefs, using the rites, where they were
used, simply as symbols of civic duty.
Speculative Philosophy completed the work of destruction. Where the
moral theorists laid bare the inferiority and uselessness of the
ancient cults, the rationalists who accompanied and followed them broke
up, with the acid critique of their direct attack, whatever hold they
might have on reason. This movement reached its perfection in the work
of Aristotle (384-322) whose genius built up a vast encyclopaedia of
knowledge in which religion and morality found their place, based this
time on critical reasoning from observed facts.
Greek Thought and the official Greek religion henceforth went their
separate ways. At its best the Thought was immensely superior to the
Cults, and even though in the centuries that followed the golden age
Philosophy declined and decayed, the cults never recovered their
one-time uncontested supremacy. The conquests of Alexander the Great,
which opened new spheres of influence to Greek culture, spread its
medley of religions and philosophies throughout the East. Oriental
religions in turn affected the religion of the conquerors, and with the
political revolutions brought about the last stage of religious
transformation. The old official religion had been too intimately
associated with the local city-state not to lose some if its importance
when the city-state fell. Alexander, on his death, was ranked among the
gods -- an example only too quickly followed in the case of his
multitude of successors in all the countries into which his vast Empire
was partitioned. The myths ceased to have any meaning other than
mythical; and slowly Greek religion took its place as one element among
many in the great movement which, throughout the Empire, was slowly
fusing all beliefs and cults into one amorphous unmeaning thing.
As with the Greeks of Homeric times, so it was with the Romans; their
earliest religion was animist in its basis. Natural forces, air, fire,
water, the sky, the lightning and the storm -- these manifestations of
superhuman power, won a reverence from that association, and were
envisaged as the manifestations of the divine personalities who dwelt
in them. More peculiarly Roman, and more in keeping with the Roman
character, was the notion of the divinity as the guardian of life, the
patron of all its actions. From this notion sprang a whole host of
minor deities; for every act of life had its appropriate deity, under
whose invocation and with whose aid, the life was lived, the action
performed. So in infancy it was Educa that taught the child to eat, and
Potina to drink. Cuba watched over his cradle, and while Ossipago
strengthened his bones and Carna his flesh, Statanus secured that he
stood upright and Abeona that he walked. Fabulinus, Farinus and
Locutius initiated him in the art of speech, Terduca cared for him as
he went to school and Domiduca as he returned. . . and others of the
vast army assisted at every act of every stage of adolescence and
maturity.
A second particularity of this early Roman religion was its domestic
character. The Roman family was itself a sacred thing. Each member had
his guardian deity; the Lar Familiaris guarded the field in which the
house was built, and in the house itself the shrine of the Penates,
with its daily ritual of oblations, was the very centre of family life.
The strength of the domestic religion was shown perhaps most of all in
the cult of the dead -- a cult designed to placate the shades of the
departed, to supply their wants in the life to which they had gone,
and, in the last development, to establish a communion and intercourse
between them and the worshippers.
But the gods of the Romans -- even, originally, the major gods Jupiter,
Juno and the rest -- were powers rather than persons. The practical,
unimaginative character of the people coloured its religion. There was
no speculation as to the nature of the gods, no imaginative mythology,
no artistic representation, no temples even. Religion, like the world
of fact, was something to be used, not a theme for meditation. The
Roman, in whom the notion of contract was instinctive, dealt with his
gods accordingly. The appointed ritual produced the ordained effect;
and all his service of the gods was wholly legalist, wholly formalist,
the careful execution of man's share of the bilateral agreement.
Mysticism, love of the gods, devotion -- in the usual sense of the --;
word -- could have no place in such a religion; and Cicero was never
truer to tradition than when he defined sanctity as the science of
ritual.
With this legalist spirit, there went the kindred notion of authority.
Not that there was any priestly caste. The priest is no more than a
master of ceremonies, seeing to the exact observance of the rite. In
the domestic cults it was the head of the house who officiated, and in
the public cults it was the magistrates or the colleges of priests
assimilated to them. But Roman religion was a political thing. The city
was the family developed, and was itself a sacred thing, a holy place.
Hence not only was the supervision of domestic cults a duty of its
magistrates, but as the city developed, as it conquered its weaker
neighbours, the victory had a religious character and it was in the
imposition and acceptance of the Roman religion that the new political
gains were consolidated. Thus by a development very different from that
which followed the Greek conquest of the East under Alexander, the
Roman gods entered as victors into the pantheon of whatever people the
Romans overcame. It was a trait in their religious mentality in which
the later cult of the State, or of the emperor, was to find a strong
foundation. Civic Authority and Religion went ever together, but with
the State in unquestioned primacy. The priesthood had no influence in
political life. Rather it was the politician who usurped the
priesthood.
As the Roman city grew in importance, other forces began slowly to
influence its religious development, of which by far the most important
were from Greece. From the sixth century B.C. the tide flowed ever more
strongly, and Greek Anthropomorphism with its mythology entered into
rivalry with the impersonal native Roman austerity. Greek rites too
were introduced despite repeated prohibitions, and presently, in the
usual way, the new foreign deities were adapted to and identified with
the ancient gods of the fatherland. With the Greek religions came, too,
the Greek scepticism; and in Rome, as in Greece, the mythology reacted
unfavourably on the religion that bred it, once philosophical criticism
was free to deal with the mythology.
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