ROMAN RELIGION
When we think of Rome as the cradle of more than one civilisation, we
should also recollect that the Roman has matured two great religions:
the religion of ancient Rome and the religion of Western Christendom.
Not that we can think of the Roman as a religious people, in the sense
in which the Asiatic has always been and remains to this day
religious, the sense in which the Hebrew or the sense in which the
Egyptian was religious. The Roman never had either the imaginative
philosophy which produced the religion of Greece, nor the metaphysical
mysticism which made the Hindu faiths. He had in fact in common with
the Hebrew, whom he was so totally unlike, a complete absence of the
metaphysical temper, of mysticism, of asceticism; and like the Hebrew
he did not apply any richness of imagination to religion. What he had
was a genius for bringing the other world to the support of this, and
what he created was the conception of religion as _piety to the
State_; and it is in this form that it survives in the sympathies and
the sentiment of the Roman people. In the pagan world this State was
secular, in the Christian world this State is the Catholic Church;
but in both cases the spiritual came to the support of the
temporal--ancient Rome deified the State by making it the subject of
the Roman piety; Christian Rome moulded religion into a citizenship,
and the Church became a _civitas_. _Civis romanus sum_, "I am a Roman
citizen," has never ceased to be the all-embracing formula of Roman
orthodoxy.
The original Roman theogony was Etruscan. Behind the veil were the
three great gods, the shrouded gods, answering to the Jove, Juno, and
Minerva (_Menerva_) of later times. Round them were their "Senate,"
the twelve gods and goddesses known to the Romans as the _Dii
Consentes_; and everywhere was the great Latin cult of Vesta, the cult
of the hearth. But when Rome was built its first king made of these
elements the Roman religion: Numa as a matter of fact appears to have
been the Roman Moses, and to have led his people forth not to the
worship of their one tribal god who was above all gods, God and Lord,
the unique divine realisation of the Hebrew people, to become the root
of the monotheism of the Western world, but to the worship of a unit
which made of the State the family, of the commonwealth the family's
hearth. It was, perhaps, his genius which made the hearth-divinity
preside over the little polity and confuse and identify for ever the
pieties of the home with the pieties of citizenship. It is these two
elements--the theological unit of Judaea and the political unit of
Latium--which meeting in Rome in the age of Claudius created the
religion of the West. Not once but twice had the Romans come and
wrested the sceptre from Judaea; under Titus, and again in the Roman
organisation of Christianity _venerunt Romani et tulerunt eorum locum
et gentem_.
We see then that the Roman religion was never a great imaginative
creation, but was always a great statecraft, and that Roman religion
began to be Roman statecraft when Numa identified the affections and
the piety of the hearth with the affections and the piety of the _res
publica_, and made the State the social unit. The original ingredients
of Roman religion however had nothing to do with statecraft; they were
the ingredients of nature worship, the ingredients brought by a
pastoral people. At the source was a reverence for natural things; and
old Latin paganism had the peace which belongs to the pastoral life,
and to the religion which is founded on the careful observance of
potent rites disturbed as yet by no speculative questionings. But it
was not free of the gloom of nature-worship--the obverse side of
nature-cult--fearful, suspicious, weighted with destiny, as one
imagines the religion of Etruria to have been.
[Illustration: SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH
The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more
ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest
meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house
of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and
altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir
is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the
lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the
fourth. See pages 35-36, 183, 186-7.]
It is much later in its history that Rome was captivated by Greek
religion and transferred to its crude impersonal gods the brilliant
divine personifications of an imaginative people. The Latin had never
been familiar with his gods, perhaps because they always remained
impersonal abstractions, gods who did not use human speech, but whose
language was the lightning-bolt of Jupiter and the wave-lashing triad
of Neptune. Into what had really always been impersonal, the Greek
came infusing warm human life, making the gods speak the language of
men, and inviting men to speak to them in their own tongue. Greek
religion was subtler, more individual, freer, more joyous than Latin.
The pious customs which constituted the earlier Latin religion had
begotten a sense of obligation in the worshipper, but it was
conscience as the response to an external stimulus; and the peace it
brought was a formal peace, _ex opere operato_, not a peace brought
home to the individual conscience face to face with the Divine. It is
because conscience implies more of individualism than ever entered
into Roman religion that Roman religion has always remained without
it. It was only in the jaded period of the later empire that the
Romans turned altogether from the simple, natural, large elements of
the religion of their soil to the fantastic, emotional, and complex
cults of Isis and Mithras. The simple religion of the field and the
hearth, of natural law, of orderliness and decorum, of a piety
provoking and sustaining a sense of _what was owed_ to the gods, to
the dead, to that State which incarnated the religion of the gods,
fell away on the eve of Christianity before the foreign novelties of
Greece and Egypt, better suited to the luxuriousness of mind and the
growing introspection of a people who had undergone the influence of
Greek thought as something indeed always alien to their nature, yet
necessary to their place in the world.
When Peter's successors planted a Judaic sect on the ruins of this
paganism they had only to follow the genius of Numa's religion in the
creation of the Catholic Church--the _civitas Dei_. Here, we may feel,
an essential element of the new religion--the idea of the Kingdom of
God--came naturally to supplant the older State religion; and the
conception of the nation as a family was eminently germane to the
fraternal maxims which grouped round the idea of the _ecclesia_. But
old Rome as it had not stopped to inquire concerning small things, so
it had never penetrated to interior things, and the Kingdom of God
translated into the language of Rome lost in the process all its
interior characters. What was delicate and subtle had never entered
into Roman religion, but neither had what was petty, extravagant, or
indecorous. Religion was no delicate aroma, but a concrete duty; not
an individual choice, nor an individual necessity, nor an individual
attraction, but a public rite, a public piety, a public decorum: and
these characteristics, as we shall see, inhere in Roman religion
to-day.
It is in its liturgy that the mind, or if one may call it so, the
temperament of the Roman Church found an ample and worthy expression;
and it is in what it lacked as much as in what it put forward that the
genius of the Roman rite is seen to differ entirely from that which
presided at the making of the mass in every other part of Christendom.
The effusion the imagery and the gracious parts added from Gaul, the
mysticism of the Oriental, the philosophy of Greece, the Northern
inwardness and intimacy, contributed nothing to it. Like Roman
religion itself it was not a creation of the imagination or the
intellect, nor the outcome of devotional sentiment; it was the
creation of the Christian polity clothing its religious data, its
religious certitudes, in a becoming garment--giving them a form,
expression, a public characterisation. If there was no effusion there
was largeness; in place of tenderness there was disengaged from the
formal stately public act a perfect liberty of spirit. All through it
was the public act itself which justified and consecrated, which was
the sanction of the reality the criterion of the fitness of worship.
Here besides, _sacramenta_ were not mere signs nor _symbola_ mere
figures--they were stately vehicles of universal realities, always and
everywhere adequate, worthy, co-ordinating, effectual. Roman ritual
was quite bare of those things which in England and France are thought
ritualistic; its only ritual consisted in the so-called "manual acts,"
that is, in the things which had to be done; those very things which
the Eastern Church removed from the sight of the congregation,
creating a "ritual" as a superfluous symbolism to engage the attention
of the people. But the Roman dealt in real things, not imagery;
nakedly setting forth his _sancta_ in the dry light of a realism which
had no reticence joined to a great reticence of the emotions. This was
the temperament of all Roman religion, pagan and Christian, a
persistent rejection of all that could be described as unctuous, a
setting forth of worship as a great public piety which justified
itself. Unlike the Greek whose god must be behind a curtain, the Roman
required the divine to be recognised, always and everywhere, in the
_res publica_, in the act which had public sanction, public
significance, public utility. The deacons came to the holy table
bearing a cloth; one stood at one end and threw the roll across to the
deacon at the other end; the oblations of the people were manipulated
before the assembly; the wine collected in small phials is poured into
a large chalice, repoured into a bowl; the pontiff collects the
oblation bread, so do the priests, while acolytes stand at the side
holding cloths to receive it; and the same things, not rites but
familiar usages, are repeated at the Communion, when bishop and
deacons again pour, mix, distribute, wash and put away the holy things
and the sacred vessels in the presence and with the assistance of the
people of God. Here was nothing "common or unclean"; it was the wisdom
of Roman ritual justified of her children.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN
A very early Christian basilica, in the historic part of Rome by
Ponte Rotto and the round temple of Hercules, and on the site of the
temple of Ceres and Proserpine. In the sixth century it is
enumerated among diaconal churches. It belonged to the Greek colony
in this quarter, and its name is derived from the word _kosmos_.
Pavement, ambones, choir, and canopy are of the twelfth century. It
has been recently restored to its ancient basilica form, and its
many closed windows have been reopened. See pages 28, 31, 35-36,
186.]
It will be seen at once how widely different was such a conception of
worship from that elaborated in the East or which we owe to the vague
awe, the dreadful sense of mystery, of the middle age. If we compare
the Roman basilica with a Greek or Gothic church this difference is
immediately sensible. The former owed nothing to mystery, to dimness.
The celebrant faced the people, as he still faces them in all true
basilicas; he did not turn his back on them. No early building,
indeed, was flooded with light while glazing was in a crude state and
wind and weather had to be kept at bay; but the Christian basilica was
not darker than other buildings, there was no religious twilight. And
as we see it to-day, in _Santa Sabina_, _Santa Maria in Cosmedin_,
_Santa Maria in Domnica_, _SS. Nereo e Achilleo_, _Santa Maria
Maggiore_, or in the ruined basilicas of _Santa Domitilla_ and _San
Stefano_, so it was centuries ago--flooding the mysteries with what
light there was because it was the church of a people who cared for no
mysteries which could not bear the light. Nevertheless, the simple
realism of the Roman ritual by no means meant, for him who could see,
the absence of mysticity. Rather it recalled one to the suggestive and
sane mysticity which inheres in all common things, in all common uses.
Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small
matters and to the unobvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian
service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; but though
it is certain he had not set himself to create this mysticity it is
equally certain that he could not banish it from his churches.
Italian religion is not the same thing as Roman religion. Rome has not
been "the most religious city in the world" because it felt religion
more than those nations and provinces whose religious character
differed so profoundly from its own, but because it was able to
institute it on a scale as universal as its own imperialism. The
Neapolitan has the superstition and poetry, the emotional
impressionism, of the genuine South; but such a repulsive scene as the
peasant, upheld by his friends, licking his way to the altar along the
filthy church floor could not be witnessed in Rome. It would be
difficult to imagine a Roman wishing to be exorcised after putting his
head into the English or American church to see the stained glass
windows. The "Roman of Rome" leaves such things together with the
swallowing of pious-text pills to the unrestrained fervour of some of
our English Catholics. The Roman has less religious passion and also
much less abandonment to the external than the Southerner or even the
Englishman. Rome has had--with one illustrious exception--no great
saints since the sixth century; she has been evangelised by saintly
visitors from Sweden, from Tuscany, from Siena, as the primitive
Church had been edified by the itinerant Gospel visitors called
"prophets." From Lombardy, Venice and Umbria, from Parma, Ancona,
Florence, Pisa, Naples and the Abruzzi, saints, seers, missioners,
mystics, reformers, have brought her their message: but the terrible
proverb _Roma veduta fede perduta_ records the impression she has
often made on visitors less elect than these. Not Rome but Venice
counts as the "devout city" of Italy, and the well-known story of the
Jew who became a Christian on the ground that no religion could have
survived Roman corruption unless it were divine, was told me in Rome
by a prelate as an encouraging episode.
It was said by Matthew Arnold that the Latin people never cared enough
for Christianity to reform it; they never thought it worth while, it
is true, to break with the Church to find Christianity. The Italian,
moreover, had none of the things which made the Puritan--not his
fierce dogmatism, the Judaic strain of his piety, his dread of the
external, his contentment with doctrinal formulas. Joined to an
indubitable attachment to Catholicism--the magic of which inspired
the art even of men who did not believe it--the Italian had also too
keen an intuition of the real religious issues (as we understand them
to-day) to exchange ecclesiastical tradition for biblical dogmatism.
Christianity was for him much more of a self-justifying religious
tradition and much less of a dogmatism than it was for the Protestant.
The Christianity which the Italian would have liked was the
Christianity of S. Francis, familiar, meek, tolerant, a genuine
discipleship; and it did not irk him to add to this the forms of
Catholicism. Like the Reformers, the Italian of the sixteenth century
knew little of Church history, but his instinct was on the side of
reintegration rather than disintegration of the religious forces
enshrining the Christian revelation. The earlier Italian religious
movements were almost entirely, like that of the seraphic _frate_, on
the side of informing historical Christianity with the new spirit of
Christ. A great horror of the ways of Rome, never echoed by the
Romans, did, nevertheless, penetrate religious Italy, and few people
realise that it was among the Franciscans not among the Reformers that
papal Rome was first branded as the "scarlet woman," the unclean
Babylon of the Apocalypse.
Has Protestantism the evangelic marks which the Italian, consciously
or unconsciously, lays down for Christianity, and what chance would it
have in Italy? It will bear repeating that the Puritan's definition of
Christianity would never at any time have found acceptance with the
Italian; he never could have cared for reform in doctrine and
discipline which did not necessarily, did not primarily, involve a
real evangelic reform. When one remembers how very little
Protestantism was, in its inception, on the side of dogmatic freedom,
and that it put a theological formula before all other matters of the
law, one may admit that the Italian though he did not reform may yet
have loved true Christianity. In the next place the intense
individualism of Protestant worship is distasteful to the Italian who,
as we have already realised, does not ask or require that
subordination of the society to the individual which religious
subdivisions imply, and he would always be repelled by the phenomena
of revivalism. It is instructive for us to realise that such things
are stigmatised as "buffoonery" by the Italians, whose own elaborate
ritual often appears to suggest that description to the Protestant. In
the third place, he dislikes the _reclame_ of Protestantism, its
self-advertisement, the distribution of tracts at church doors and in
the public streets. To his mind no religion worthy of the name can
have need of such support. The Sister of Charity and the _frate_,
indeed, appear familiarly among them in their strange dress, not as
they, yet part of themselves, reminding the people of the great ideals
of their religion, tracts in their own persons but making no
_reclame_.
[Illustration: CHAPEL OF SAN ZENO (called _orto del paradiso_) IN S.
PRASSEDE
This mosaic chapel was erected by Paschal I. in 822. Its great
beauty gave it the name of "Garden of Paradise." The church is near
the house of Pudens, and is dedicated to Praxedis his daughter. See
pages 45, 46, 240.]
Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the
Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to
the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the
German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in
England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of
external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We
are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he
gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by
his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do
not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is
active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable,
for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony.
The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may
some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity--as the
catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"--he will always require
gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to assist his
imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense,
to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence,
and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not
understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service
conceived in the spirit of the mass, with its mystical renewal enacted
before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate;
but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal
element.
The visitor to Rome must be struck with the fact that the Italians are
a more religious people than we. They take more trouble about it.
Every morning, day after day, in scores of churches people are going
in and out of the heavy leathern door hangings, up and down the steps
of the facades; such a spectacle as the visit to the sepulchres on
Holy Thursday could not be witnessed in England from one year's end to
another. At the street corners, on the stairs, in the shops and the
porters' lodges, oil lamps burn before images and shrines; and the
deepest curse in the Italian vocabulary is to say _La mala Pasqua_--"a
bad Easter to you." "In all things I perceive that ye are somewhat
superstitious," said S. Paul, taking as the pretext of his appeal to
the Athenians the trouble and care which he saw everywhere bestowed on
the unseen world and the claims of worship: and he could make the same
appeal to the Romans to-day with perhaps a greater chance of
converting them than the missionary from America. For there is no
"provincialism" in Italian religion; the Sunday joys of discussing the
anthem, the sermon, the preacher, the details of the service and the
congregation, the half mystical half sentimental joy of chewing the
cud of sacred things which is so Northern, offer no attractions to the
man of the South. He has endless time in the South but no long
twilights. In religion as elsewhere the Roman harbours no illusions.
The things--petty or precious--which are possible to a people who can
maintain illusions, and have no inconvenient quickness of mind, are
not to be expected from him. Chadbands in Rome would have no success
and no dupes; and your transcendental emotional sentiments about the
Pope are perhaps as little understood as your rejection of him. The
Roman dreads death, and he refers to the anointing oil as "_quella
cosa piu peggio del viatico_"--"that thing which is still worse
than the Viaticum." He lives familiarly with his religion and in a
sort of child-like simplicity; yet he is sceptical, and we are not, he
has no talent for meditative devotion, and we have.
[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF S. PAUL'S-WITHOUT-THE-WALLS
Erected between 1193 and 1208. The most beautiful cloisters in Rome.
See interleaf, page 158, and page 36.]
Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as
little tolerated as the _reclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is
absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride
and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is
so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are
the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better
educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of
the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies
in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible
"respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where
Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy
is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest
monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently
motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was
giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the
mass; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he
is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic
priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas
midnight mass to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival.
These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist
chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not
quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human
interest, the brotherhood of class, oppose themselves here to English
self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of
propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances
multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss
of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little
understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he
does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the attitude which
the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to
assume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The
Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon
popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma
and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked
and distrusted, in either sex, when met. The Roman peasant trudging
into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in
the Via Nazionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once
points out to him his place in the house of God--for this is the
American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was
uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not
Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another
surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds
he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no
more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not
mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you
from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic.
These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its
familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of
spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are
the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has
sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city
which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example,
Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of
its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing
up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who
enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal,
the priests are quaestors and their vergers are lictors. Such things
certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the
Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty
of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same title, the house of
the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis,
that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of
twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral,
in both cases women and Catholics, were assaulted by the beadle in
charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their
innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed
the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does
not easily feel that desire to assault which possesses the Teutonic
official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is
political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers
of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of
a Cologne beadle in their souls.
The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves
itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism
decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the
dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid
sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism
will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to
memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and
sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the
senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist
of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the
haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.
[Illustration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was
built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with
mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.]
The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races,
who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted
Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or
more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the
catacombs to a solemn mass in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and
the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on
Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in
catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its
primitive counterpart in the shepherds' god Lupercus "driver away
of wolves," whose worship was celebrated in _Roma Quadrata_ by the
original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a
libation. But he who said _Ego sum pastor bonus_ is gathering the
sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving
the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person
of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman
religion was capable of assimilating; but the moral implications of
this personality--after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of
the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its
realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist--were never really
appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal mass
prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his
predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too
officiated as _pontifex maximus_. The very chairs of the bishops in
Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his titular
church sits on a throne) are the _curule_ chairs of the Roman
magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things
in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan
pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions
were vested in the _Lucomones_. Though Greek theology twice enriched
Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek
and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive
feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and
in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is
least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been.
There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as
elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose
there as elsewhere among the "Jews of the dispersion," and certain
Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at
once took their place in its public worship. But Rome has, here also,
preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian
Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element.
At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon
one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a
fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there
the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--"the voice
of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew
history.
The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his
Kingdom of God on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of
Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion
of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience.
Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the
other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to
Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral
considerations connected with Abel.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA
The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called "S. Mary above
Minerva" because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the goddess,
was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only
instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the
Roman basilica is manifest.]
It is the _pax romana_, the peace of the Roman empire, which was
actually established as "the Peace of the Church." The peace,
juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of
Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the _civis
romanus_. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and
Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it
conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of
earthly entities--to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox
strangers dying in Rome record--_in pace_. The Roman citizenship
becomes the Catholic citizenship through the mediation of the Apostle
who could say "But I am a Roman born," while setting forth imperially
a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen
who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates
that new _imperium_ where Rome may claim that all homage is paid _et
mihi et Petro_, confounds those two things which the master of the
Gospel "of the Kingdom" had set apart, the things of Caesar and the
things of God.