RELIGION AND MORALITY--CONCLUSION
It might be said that a religion--the expression of man's relation to
the unseen--has not necessarily any connection with morality--man's
action in himself and towards his neighbours: that an individual--or
even a nation--might perfectly fulfil the duties imposed by the 'powers
above,' without being influenced in conduct and character. Such a view
might seem to find an apt illustration in the religion of Rome: the
ceremonial _pietas_ towards the gods appears to have little to do with
the making of man or nation. But in the history of the world the test
of religions must be their effect on the character of those who
believed in them: religion is no doubt itself an outcome of character,
but it reacts upon it, and must either strengthen or weaken. We are not
therefore justified in dismissing the 'Religion of Numa' without
inquiry as to its relation to morality, for on our answer to that
question must largely depend our judgment as to its value.
We are of course in a peculiarly difficult position to grapple with
this problem through lack of contemporary evidence. The Rome we know,
in the epochs when we can fairly judge of character and morality, was
not the Rome in which the 'Religion of Numa' had grown up and remained
unquestioned: it had been overlaid with foreign cults and foreign
ideas, had been used by priests and magistrates as a political
instrument, and discounted among the educated through the influence of
philosophy. But we may remember in the first place that even then,
especially in the household and in the country, the old religion had
probably a much firmer hold than one might imagine from literary
evidence, in the second that national character is not the growth of a
day, so that we may safely refer permanent characteristics to the
period when the old religion held its own.
It may be admitted at once that the direct influence on morality was
very small indeed. There was no table of commandments backed by the
religious sanction: the sense of 'sin,' except through breach of
ritual, was practically unknown. It is true that in the very early
_leges regiae_ some notion of this kind is seen--a significant glimpse
of what the original relation may have been: it is there ordained that
the patron who betrayed his client, or the client who deceived his
patron, shall be condemned to Iuppiter; the parricide to the spirits of
his dead ancestors, the husband who sells his wife to the gods of the
underworld, the man who removes his neighbour's landmark to Terminus,
the stealer of corn to Ceres. All these persons shall be _sacri_: they
have offended against the gods and the gods will see to their
punishment. But these are old-world notions which soon passed into the
background and the state took over the punishment of such offenders in
the ordinary course of law. Nor again in the prayers of men to gods is
there a trace of a petition for moral blessings: the magistrate prays
for the success and prosperity of the state, the farmer for the
fertility of his crops and herds, even the private individual, who
suspends his votive-tablet in the temple, pays his due for health or
commercial success vouchsafed to himself or his relations. 'Men call
Iuppiter greatest and best,' says Cicero, 'because he makes us not just
or temperate or wise, but sound and healthy and rich and wealthy.'
Still less, until we come to the moralists of the Empire, is there any
sense of that immediate and personal relation of the individual to a
higher being, which is really in religion, far more than commandments
and ordinances, the mainspring and safeguard of morality: even the
conception of the Genius, the 'nearest' perhaps of all unseen powers,
had nothing of this feeling in it, and it may be significant that, just
because of his nearness to man, the Genius never quite attained to
god-head. As far as direct relation is concerned, religion and morality
were to the Roman two independent spheres with a very small point of
contact.
Nor even in its indirect influence does the formal observance of the
Roman worship seem likely at first sight to have done much for personal
or national morality. Based upon fear, stereotyped in the form of a
legal relationship, _religio_--'the bounden obligation'--made, no
doubt, for a kind of conscientiousness in its adherents, but a cold
conscientiousness, devoid of emotion and incapable of expanding itself
to include other spheres or prompt to a similar scrupulousness in other
relations. The rigid and constant distinction of sacred and profane
would incline the Roman to fulfil the routine of his religious duty
and then turn, almost with a sigh of relief, to the occupations of
normal life, carrying with him nothing more than the sense of a burden
laid aside and a pledge of external prosperity. Even the religious act
itself might be without moral significance: as we have seen, the
worshipper might be wholly ignorant of the character, even the name of
the deity he worshipped, and in any case the motive of his action was
naught, the act itself everything. Nor again had the Roman religion any
trace of that powerful incentive to morality, a doctrine of rewards and
punishments in a future life: the ideas as to the fate of the dead were
fluctuating and vague, and the Roman was in any case much more
interested in their influence on himself than in their possible
experiences after death.
The divorce then between religion and morality seems almost complete
and it is not strange that most modern writers speak of the Roman
religion as a tiresome ritual formalism, almost wholly lacking in
ethical value. And yet it did not present itself in this light to the
Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the
cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could
believe that its revival was an essential condition for the
renaissance of the Roman character. Have we, in our brief examination
of its characteristics, seen any features which may suggest the
solution of this apparent antagonism? Was there in this formalism a
life which escapes us, as we handle the dry bones of antiquarianism?
In the first place there may be a danger that we underrate the value
of formalism itself. It spells routine, but routine is not without
value in the strengthening of character. The private citizen, who
conscientiously day by day had carried out the worship of his household
gods and month by month observed the sacred abstinence from work on the
days of festival, was certainly not less fitted to take his place as a
member of a strenuous and well-organised community, or to serve
obediently and quietly in the army on campaign. Even the magistrate in
the execution of his religious duties must have acquired an exactness
and method, which would not be valueless in the conduct of public
business. And when we pass to the origin of this formalism--the legal
relation--the connection with the Roman character becomes at once more
obvious. The 'lawgivers of the world,' who developed constitution and
code to a systematised whole such as antiquity had not dreamed of
before, imported, we may say if we like, their legal notions into the
sphere of religion: but we must not forget the other side of the
question. The permanence and success of this greater contract with
higher powers--the feeling that the gods did regard and reward exact
fulfilment of duty--cannot have been without re-action on the relations
of the life of the community: it was, as it were, a higher sanction to
the legal point of view: a pledge that the relations of citizen and
state too were rightly conceived. 'There is,' says Cicero, speaking of
the death of Clodius in the language of a later age, 'there is a divine
power which inspired that criminal to his own ruin: it was not by
chance that he expired before the shrine of the Bona Dea, whose rites
he had violated': the divine justice is the sanction of the human law.
Even in the fear, from which all ultimately sprang, there was a
training in self-repression and self-subordination, which in a more
civilised age must result in a valuable respect and obedience. The
descendants of those who had made religion out of an attempt to appease
the hostile _numina_, feeling themselves not indeed on more familiar
terms with their 'unknown gods,' but only perhaps a little more
confident of their own strength, were not likely to be wanting in a
disciplined sense of dependence and an appreciation of the value of
respect for authority, which alone can give stability to a
constitution. If fear with the Romans was not the beginning of
theological wisdom, it was yet an important contribution to the
character of a disciplined state.
But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the
answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general understanding
of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of the household.
If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where religion and
morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a clue. There not
only are the principal events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage,
attended by their religious sanction, but in the ordinary course of the
daily round the divine presence and the dependence of man are
continually emphasised. The gods are given their portion of the family
meal, the sanctified dead are recalled to take their share of the
family blessings. The result was not merely an approach--collectively,
not individually--to that sense of the nearness of the unseen, which
has so great an effect on the actions of the living, but a very strong
bond of family union which lay at the root of the life of the state.
It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the notion than
in the fact that the same word _pietas_, which expresses the due
fulfilment of man's duty to god, is also the ideal of the relations of
the members of a household: filial piety was, in fact, but another
aspect of that rightness of relation, which reveals itself in the
worship of the gods. No doubt that, in the city-life of later periods,
this ideal broke down on both sides: household worship was neglected
and family life became less dutiful. But it was still, especially in
the country, the true backbone of Roman society, and no one can read
the opening odes of Horace's third book without feeling the strength of
Augustus' appeal to it.
And if we translate this, as we have learned to do, into terms of the
state, we can get some idea of what the Romans meant by their debt to
their religion. As the household was bound together by the tie of
common worship, as in the intermediate stage the clan, severed
politically and socially, yet felt itself reunited in the gentile
rites, so too the state was welded into a whole by the regularly
recurring annual festivals and the assurance of the divine sanction on
its undertakings. It might be that in the course of time these rites
lost their meaning and the community no longer by personal presence
expressed its service to the gods, but the cult stood there still, as
the type of Rome's union to the higher powers and a guarantee of their
assistance against all foes: the religion of Rome was, as it has been
said, the sanctification of patriotism--the Roman citizen's highest
moral ideal. It has been remarked, perhaps with partial truth, that the
religion of the _Æneid_--in many ways a summary of Roman thought and
feeling--is the belief in the _fata Romae_ and their fulfilment. The
very impersonality of this conception makes it a good picture of what
religion was in the Roman state. It was not, as with the Jews, a strong
conviction of the rightness of their own belief and a certainty that
their divine protectors must triumph over those of other nations, but a
feeling of the constant presence of some spirits, who, 'if haply they
might find them,' would, on the payment of their due, bear their part
in the great progress of right and justice and empire on which Rome
must march to her victory. It was the duty of the citizen, with this
conception of his city before his eyes, to see to it that the state's
part in the contract was fulfilled. From his ancestors had been
inherited the tradition, which told him the when, where, and how, and
in the preservation of that tradition and its due performance consisted
at once Rome's duty and her glory. 'If we wish,' says Cicero, 'to
compare ourselves with other nations, we may be found in other respects
equal or even inferior; in religion, that is in the worship of the
gods, we are far superior.' The religion of Rome may not have advanced
the theology or the ethics of the world, but it made and held together
a nation.
WORKS BEARING ON THE EARLY RELIGION OF ROME
_The Golden Bough_, (2nd Ed.). J.G. FRAZER.
_History of Rome_, BOOK I. CHAP XII. TH. MOMMSEN.
_Die Religion der Römer._ E. AUST.
_Religion und Kultus der Römer._ G. WISSOWA.
_Il Culto Privato di Roma Antica_, PART I. A. DE-MARCHI.
_The Roman Festivals._ W. WARDE FOWLER.
_The Religion of Numa._ J.B. CARTER.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Religion of Ancient Rome, by Cyril Bailey