perhaps the infernal also. In the gardens of the Academe and along the
banks of the Ilissus, he announced a Last Judgment. The announcement,
contained in the _Phaedo_, had for supplement a picture that may have
been Persian, of the righteous ascending to heaven and the wicked
descending to hell. In the _Laws_, the picture was annotated with a
statement to the effect that whatever a man may do, there is an eye
that sees him, a memory that registers and retains. In the _Republic_
he declared that afflictions are blessings in disguise. But his
"Republic," a utopian commonwealth, was not, he said, of this world,
adding in the _Phaedo_, that few are chosen though many are called.
The mystery of the catholicism of the Incas, reported back to the Holy
Office, was there defined as an artifice of the devil. With finer
circumspection, Christian Fathers attributed the denser mystery of
Greek philosophy to the inspiration of God.
Certainly it is ample. As exemplified by Plato it has, though, its
limitations. There is no charity in it. Plato preached humility, but
there is none in his sermons. His thought is a winged thing, as the
thought of a poet ever should be. But in the expression of it he seems
smiling, disdainful, indifferent as a statue to the poverties of the
heart. That too, perhaps, is as it should be. The high muse wears a
radiant peplum. Anxiety is banished from the minds that she haunts.
Then, also, if, in the nectar of Plato's speech, compassion is not an
ingredient, it may be because, in his violet-crowned city, it was
strewn open-handed through the beautiful streets. There, public
malediction was visited on anyone that omitted to guide a stranger on
his way.
Israel was too strictly monotheistic to raise an altar to Pity, the
rest of antiquity too cruel. In Athens there was one. In addition
there were missions for the needy, asylums for the infirm. If
anywhere, at that period, human sympathy existed, it was in Greece.
The aristocratic silence of Plato may have been due to that fact. He
would not talk of the obvious, though he did of the vile. In one of
his books the then common and abnormal conception of sexuality was, if
not authorized, at least condoned. It is conjectural, however, whether
the conception was more monstrous than that which subsequent mysticity
evolved.
Said Ruysbroeck: "The mystic carries her soul in her hand and gives it
to whomsoever she wishes." Said St. Francis of Sales: "The soul draws
to itself motives of love and delectates in them." What the gift and
what the delectation were, other saints have described.
Marie de la Croix asserted that in the arms of the celestial Spouse
she swam in an ocean of delight. Concerning that Spouse, Marie
Alacoque added: "Like the most passionate of lovers he made me
understand that I should taste what is sweetest in the suavity of
caresses, and indeed, so poignant were they, that I swooned." The
ravishments which St. Theresa experienced she expressed in terms of
abandoned precision. Mme. Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine that
Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I dared, I would pray that a seraph
with a flaming sword might come and purify my lips sullied by this
recital."[39]
[Footnote 39: Relation sur le Quietisme.]
Augustin pleasantly remarked that we are all born for hell. One need
not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the
impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn
away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is
ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced.
At Athens, meanwhile, the religion of State persisted. So also did
philosophy. When, occasionally, the two met, the latter bowed. That
was sufficient. Religion exacted respect, not belief. It was not a
faith, it was a law, one that for its majesty was admired and for its
poetry was beloved. In the deification of whatever is exquisite it was
but an artistic cult. The real Olympos was the Pantheon. The other was
fading away. Deeper and deeper it was sinking back into the golden
dream from which it had sprung. Further and further the crystal
parapets were retreating. Dimmer and more dim the gorgeous host
became. In words of perfect piety Epicurus pictured them in the
felicity of the ideal. There, they had no heed of man, no desire for
worship, no wish for prayer. It was unnecessary even to think of them.
Decorously, with every homage, they were being deposed.
But if Epicurus was decorous, Evemerus was devout. It was his
endeavour, he said, not to undermine but to fortify. The gods he
described as philanthropists whom a grateful world had deified. Zeus
had waged a sacrilegious war against his father. Aphrodite was a
harlot and a procuress. The others were equally commendable. Once they
had all lived. Since then all had died. Evemerus had seen their tombs.
One should not believe him. Their parapets are dimmer, perhaps, but
from them still they lean and laugh. They are immortal as the
hexameters in which their loves unfold. Yet, oddly enough, presently
the oracle of Delphi strangled. In his cavern Trophonios was gagged.
The voice of Mopsos withered.
That is nothing. On the Ionian, the captain of a ship heard some one
calling loudly at him from the sea. The passengers, who were at table,
looked out astounded. Again the loud voice called: "Captain, when you
reach shore announce that the great god Pan is dead."[40]
[Footnote 40: Plutarch: de Oracul. defect. 14.]
It may be that it was true. It may be that after Pan the others
departed. When Paul reached Athens he found a denuded Pantheon, a
vacant Olympos, skies more empty still.
VII
JUPITER
The name of the national deity of Israel is unpronounceable. The name
of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the
hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to
death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It
may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as
was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a
quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the
Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, was
Wet-nurse.
Tertullian, perhaps naively, remarked: "Superstition has invented
these deities for whom we have substituted angels." In addition to the
diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy father
Vatican, who assisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally
holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at
speech. Neither of them had anything else to do.
Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a
wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a
she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the gods
were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been
held supreme. The other gods, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc,
were lustreless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic,
unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars
appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome
listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there.
Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into
Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them--and with them all the
others--into an irritable police. The Greek gods enchanted, those of
Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed
to so much as sneeze.
Worship, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance
against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout
bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the
exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head.
"You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human."
"Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a
pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later,
after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion
to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck
terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more
serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the
conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's.
Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we
swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had
faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it
was political. Rome never imposed her gods on the quelled. With
superior tact she lured their gods from them. At any siege, that was
her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to
avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own
national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a
secret. With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them
like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred waters. Her
early deity is unknown. But the secret of her eternity is in the
religions that she absorbed. It was these that made her immortal.
To that immortality the obscure god of an obscure people contributed
largely, perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. Jahveh might have
remained unperceived behind the veil of the sanctuary had not his
altar been illuminated by lights from other shrines. In the early days
of the empire, Rome was fully aware of the glamour of Amon, of the
star of Ormuzd, Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow heights of
Bel-Marduk. But in the splendour of Jove all these were opaque.
Jupiter, always imposing, was grandiose then. His thoughts were vast
as the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil he said of his chosen
people: "I have set no limits to their conquest or its duration. The
empire I have given them shall be without end."[41] Hebrew prophets had
spoken similarly. Vergil must have been more truly inspired. The Roman
empire, nominally holy, figuratively still exists. Yet fulfilment of
the prophecy is due perhaps less to the God of the Gentiles than to
the God of the Jews. Though perhaps also it may be permissible to
discern in the latter a transfiguration of Jove, who originally Zeus,
and primarily not Hellenic but Hindu, ultimately became supreme. After
the terrific struggle which resulted in that final metamorphosis,
Jerusalem, disinherited, saw Rome the spiritual capital of the globe.
[Footnote 41: AEneid i. 278.]
Jerusalem was not a home of logic. Rome was the city of law. That law,
cold, inflexible, passionless as a sword and quite as effective, Rome
brandished at philosophy. It is said that the intellectual gymnastics
of Greece were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that
augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would
divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might.
Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them.
Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was
philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to
the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause was a
curious theory that the world was to end. Foretold in the _Brahmanas_,
in the _Avesta_ and in the _Eddas_, probably it was in the _Sibylline
Books_. If not, the subsequent Church may have so assumed.
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Not alone David and the Sibyl but Etruscan seers had seen in the skies
that the tenth and last astronomical cycle had begun.[42] Plutarch, in
his life of Sylla, testified to the general belief in an approaching
cataclysm. Lucretius announced that at any moment it might occur.[43]
That was in the latter days of the republic. In the early days of the
empire the theory persisting may have induced the hope of a saviour.
Suetonius said that nature in her parturitions was elaborating a
king.[44] Afterward he added that such was Asia's archaic belief.[45]
Recent discoveries have verified the assertion. In the Akkadian Epic
of Dibbara a messiah was foretold.[46] That epic, anterior to a cognate
Egyptian prophecy,[47] anterior also to the _Sibylline Books_, was
anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and necessarily to those of Rome.
[Footnote 42: Censorinus: De die nat. 17.]
[Footnote 43: De rerum nat., v. 105.]
[Footnote 44: In Augusto, 74.]
[Footnote 45: In Vesp. 4.]
[Footnote 46: Jastrow: _op. cit._]
[Footnote 47: See back, Chapter III.]
Among these was Vergil. In the fourth Eclogue he beheld an age of
gold, preceded by the advent on earth of a son of Jove, under whose
auspices the last traces of sin and sorrow were to disappear and a new
race descend from heaven. "The serpent shall die," he declared,
adding: "The time is at hand."
The Eclogue was written 40 B.C., during the consulate of Pallio, whom
the poet wished perhaps to flatter. Then presently Ovid sang the
deathless soul and Tibullus gave rendezvous hereafter. The atmosphere
dripped with wonders. The air became charged with the miraculous. At
stated intervals the doors of temples opened of themselves. Statues
perspired visibly. There was a book that explained the mechanism of
these marvels. It interested nobody. Prodigies were matters of course.
The people had a heaven, also a hell, both of them Greek, a purgatory
that may have been Asiatic, and, pending the advent of the son of
Jove, in Mithra they could have had a redeemer. Had it been desired,
Buddhism could have supplied gospels, India the trinity, Persia the
resurrection, Egypt the life. From Iran could have been obtained an
Intelligence, sovereign, unimaged, and just. That was unnecessary.
Long since Socrates had displayed it. In addition, Epicurus had told
of an ascension of heavens, skies beyond the sky, worlds without
number, the many mansions of a later faith.
Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage of the stoics, in whose faultless
code the dominant note was contempt for whatever is base, respect for
all that is noble. A doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as was
everything else in Rome that was beautiful, its heights were too lofty
for the vulgar. It appealed only to the lettered, that is to the few,
to the infrequent disciples of Zeno and of Cicero, his prophet, who,
Erasmus said, was inspired by God.
It may be that Cicero inspired a few of God's preachers. The latter
were not yet in Rome. Christ had not come. At that period, unique in
history, man alone existed. The temples were thronged, but the skies
were bare. Cicero knew that. Elysium and Hades were as chimerical to
him as the Epicurean heavens. "People," he said, "talk of these places
as though they had been there." But that which was superstition to him
he regarded as beneficial for others, who had to have something and
who got it, in temples where a sin was a prayer.
There was once a play of which there has survived but the title: _The
Last Will and Testament of Defunct Jupiter._ It appeared in the days
of Diocletian, but it might have appealed when Cicero taught. Faith
then had fainted. Fright had ceased to build. Worship remained, but
religion had gone. The gods themselves were departing. The epoch
itself was apoplectic. The tramp of legions was continuous. Not alone
the skies but the world was in a ferment. It was not until a diadem,
falling from Cleopatra's golden bed, rolled to the feet of Augustus,
that the gods were stayed and faith revived.
In the interim, prisoners had been deported from Judea. At first they
were slaves. Subsequently manumitted, they formed a colony that in the
high-viced city resembled Esther in the seraglio of Ahasuerus. Rome,
amateur of cults, always curious of foreign faiths, might have been
interested in Judaism. It had many analogies with local beliefs. Its
adherents awaited, as Rome did, a messiah. They awaited too a golden
age. For those who were weary of philosophy, they had a religion in
which there was none. For those to whom the marvellous appealed, they
had a history in which miracles were a string of pearls. For those who
were sceptic concerning the post-mortem, they offered blankness. In
addition, their god, the enemy of all others, was adapted to an empire
that recognized no sovereignty but its own. Readily might Rome have
become Hebrew. But then, with equal ease, she might have become
Egyptian.
For those who were perhaps afraid of going to hell and yet may have
been equally afraid of not going anywhere, Egypt held passports to a
land of light. Then too, the gods of Egypt were friendly and
accessible. They mingled familiarly with those of Rome, complaisantly
with the deified Caesars, as already they had with the pharaohs, a
condescension, parenthetically, that did not protect them from
Tiberius, who, for reasons with which religion had nothing whatever to
do, persecuted the Egyptians, as he persecuted also the Jews. None the
less, Rome, weary of local fictions, might have become converted to
foreign ideas. In default of Syrian or Copt, she might have become
Persian as already she was Greek.
Augustus had other views. Divinities, made not merely after the image
of man but in symbols of sin, he saluted. With a hand usually small,
but in this instance tolerably large, he re-established them on their
pedestals. A relapse to spiritual infancy resulted. It was what he
sought. He wanted to be a god himself and he became one. His power
and, after him, that of his successors, had no earthly limit, no
restraint human or divine. It was the same omnipotence here that
elsewhere Jupiter wielded.
Jupiter had flamens who told him the time of day. He had others that
read to him. For his amusement there were mimes. For his delectation,
matrons established themselves in the Capitol and affected to be his
loves. But then he was superb. Made of ivory, painted vermillion,
seated colossally on a colossal throne, a sceptre in one hand, a
thunderbolt in the other, a radiating gold crown on his august head,
and, about his limbs, a shawl of Tyrian purple, he looked every inch
the god.
The Caesars, if less imposing, were more potent. Their hands, in which
there was nothing symbolic, held life and death, absolute dominion
over everything, over every one. Jupiter was but a statue. They alone
were real, alone divine. To them incense ascended. At their feet
libations poured. The nectar fumes confused. Rome, mad as they, built
them temples, raised them shrines, creating for them a worship that
they accepted, as only their due perhaps, but in which their reason
fled. In accounts of the epoch there is much mention of citizens,
senators, patricians. Nominally there were such people. Actually there
were but slaves. The slaves had a succession of masters. Among them
was a lunatic, Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There were others.
There was Terror, there was Hatred, there was Crime. These last,
though several, were yet but one. Collectively, they were Nero.
If philosophy ever were needed it was in his monstrous day. To anyone,
at any moment, there might be brought the laconic message: Die. In
republican Rome, philosophy separated man from sin. At that period it
was perhaps a luxury. In the imperial epoch it was a necessity. It
separated man from life. The philosophy of the republic Cicero
expounded. That of the empire Seneca produced.
The neo-stoicism of the latter sustained the weak, consoled the just.
It was a support and a guide. It preached poverty. It condemned
wealth. It deprecated honours and pleasure. It inculcated chastity,
humility, and resignation. It detached man from earth. It inspired, or
attempted to inspire, a desire for the ideal which it represented as
the goal of the sage, who, true child of God,[48] prepared for any
torture, even for the cross,[49] yet, essentially meek,[50] sorrowed for
mankind,[51] happy if he might die for it.[52]
[Footnote 48: De Provid. i.]
[Footnote 49: _Cf._ Lactantius vi. 17.]
[Footnote 50: Epit. cxx. 13.]
[Footnote 51: Lucanus ii. 378.]
[Footnote 52: Ibidem.]
In iambics that caressed the ear like flutes, poets had told of
Jupiter clothed in purple and glory. They had told of his celestial
amours, of his human and of his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in
Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. That god dwelled in ivory
and anapests. Seneca's deity, nowhere visible, was everywhere
present.[53] Creator of heaven and earth,[54] without whom there is
nothing,[55] from whom nothing is hidden,[56] and to whom all
belongs,[57] our Father,[58] whose will shall be done.[59]
[Footnote 53: Nemo novit Deum. Epit. xxxi. Ubique Deus. Epit. xli.]
[Footnote 54: Mundum hujus operis dominum et artificem. Quaest. nat. i.]
[Footnote 55: Sine quo nihil est. Quaest. nat. vii. 31.]
[Footnote 56: Nil Deo Clausam. Ep. lxxxx.]
[Footnote 57: Omnia habentem. Ep. xcv.]
[Footnote 58: Parens noster. Ep. cx.]
[Footnote 59: Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit. Ep. lxxv.]
"Life," said Seneca, "is a tribulation, death a release. In order not
to fear death," he added, "think of it always. The day on which it
comes judges all others."[60] Meanwhile comfort those that sorrow.[61]
Share your bread with them that hunger.[62] Wherever there is a human
being there is place for a good deed.[63] Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance
from it is the beginning of health--salvation, _salutem_."[64]
[Footnote 60: Ep. xxvi. 4.]
[Footnote 61: De Clem. ii. 6.]
[Footnote 62: Ep. xcv. 51.]
[Footnote 63: De Vita Beata, 14.]
[Footnote 64: Ep. xxviii. 9.]
Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which
they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there
is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled.
Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in
theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics
variously interpreted and recalled.
However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was
curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of
these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced
transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the
epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced
Christianity.
Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly,
among a class of poor people generally detested, particularly by the
Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of
a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently
Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything
sacred away.
Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt
that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not
inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was
poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt
also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself.
But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has
intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been
the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its
baptism of blood.
All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic
butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpass anything that had been
done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave
emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he assisted at the rape of
Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either
eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been
soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that,
as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which,
costumed as a jockey, Nero raced.
The spectacle in the amphitheatre, which fifty thousand people beheld;
the succeeding festival at which all Rome assembled, were two acts in
the birthday of a faith.
Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise Men came with gifts--the gold,
the frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds anterior though less divine.
VIII
THE NEC PLUS ULTRA
It was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his
knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The
attitude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that
Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence
of any delineation.