Unquestionably I understand and share the indignation of sincere
liberals against a government which diffused a frightful despotism over
the world. But is it our fault that the wants of humanity are diverse,
its aspirations manifold, its aims contradictory? Politics is not every
thing here below. What the world desired, after those frightful
butcheries of the earlier centuries, was gentleness, humanity. They had
enough of heroism: those vigorous goddesses, eternally brandishing their
spears on the height of the Acropolis, inspired sentiment no longer. The
earth, as in the time of Cadmus, had swallowed her most noble sons. The
proud Grecian races had killed each other. The Peloponessus was a
desert. The sweet voice of Virgil gently took up the cry of humanity,
peace, pity!
The establishment of Christianity responded to this cry of all tender
and weary souls. Christianity could only have had birth and expansion in
a time when there were no longer free cities. If there was any thing
totally lacking in the founders of the Church, it was patriotism. They
were not cosmopolites, for the entire planet was to them a place of
exile: they were idealists in the most absolute sense.
A country is a composition of soul and body. The soul is the souvenirs,
the legends, the customs, the misfortunes, the hopes, the common
sorrows: the body is the soil, the race, the language, the mountains,
the rivers, the characteristic productions. Now, was a people ever more
wanting in all this than the first Christians? They did not cling to
Judæa; after a few years they had forgotten Galilee; the glory of Greece
and Rome was indifferent to them. The countries in which Christianity
was first established--Syria, Cyprus, and Asia Minor--no longer
remembered the time when they were free. Greece and Rome, it is true,
still had a grand national sentiment. At Rome, patriotism survived in a
few families; in Greece, Christianity flourished only at Corinth,--a
city which, since its destruction by Mummius, and its reconstruction by
Cæsar, was the resort of men of all races. The true Greek countries,
then, as to-day, very jealous, very much absorbed in the memories of
their past, gave little countenance to the new doctrines: they were
always lukewarm Christians. On the contrary, those gay, indolent,
voluptuous countries of Asia and Syria, countries of pleasure, of free
manners, _de laisser aller_, accustomed to receive life and government
from others, had nothing to resign in the way of pride and traditions.
The most ancient capitals of Christianity--Antioch, Ephesus,
Thessalonica, Corinth, and Rome--were common cities, so to speak, cities
of the modern type of Alexandria, in which all races met, where that
marriage between man and the soil, which constitutes a nation, was
absolutely broken.
The importance given to social questions is always the inverse of
political pre-occupations. Socialism takes the lead when patriotism
grows weak. Christianity exploded the social and religious ideas, as was
inevitable, since Augustus had put an end to political struggles.
Christianity, if a universal worship, would, like Islamism, in reality
be the enemy of nationalities. Only centuries, only schisms, could form
national churches from a religion which was from the beginning a denial
of all terrestrial countries, which had its birth at an epoch in which
there were no longer in the world either cities or citizens, and which
the old and powerful republics of Italy and of Greece would surely have
expelled as a mortal poison to the State.
And here was one of the causes of the grandeur of the new religion.
Humanity is a multiform, changeable thing, tormented by conflicting
desires. _La patrie_ is grand, and the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylæ
are saints. But one's country is not all here below: one is a man and a
son of God, before he is a Frenchman, or a German. The kingdom of God,
an eternal dream which is never destroyed in the heart of man, is a
protestation against a too exclusive patriotism. The thought of an
organization of humanity, in view of its greatest happiness and its
moral amelioration, is legitimate. The State knows, and can only know,
one thing,--to organize a collective egoism. This is not indifference,
because egoism is the most powerful and seizable of human motives, but
is not sufficient. The governments which have rested upon the
supposition that man is composed of covetous instincts only, have
deceived themselves. Devotion is as natural as egoism to a true-born
man. The organization of devotion is religion: let no one hope, then, to
dispense with religion, or religious associations. Each progression of
modern society will render this want more imperious.
A great exaltation of religious sentiment was, then, the consequence of
the _Roman peace_ established by Augustus. Augustus realized it. But I
ask, What satisfaction could the institutions which Rome dared to
believe eternal present to the religious wants which were arising?
Surely almost nothing. All the old worships, of very different origin,
had one common trait. They shared equally the impossibility of reaching
a theological teaching, a practical morality, an edifying preaching, a
pastoral ministry truly fruitful for the people. The Pagan temple, in
its best time, was the same thing as the synagogue and the church: I
wish to say the common house, the school, the inn, the hospital, the
shelter in which the poor sought an asylum, it was a cold _cella_, into
which one seldom entered, where one learned nothing. The affectation
which led the Roman patricians to distinguish the "religion," that is to
say, their own worship, from the "superstition," that is to say, the
worship of strangers, appears to us puerile. All the Pagan worships were
essentially superstitious. The peasant who in our day places a sou in
the box of a miraculous chapel, who invokes some saint on account of his
oxen, or his horses, who drinks certain waters for certain maladies, is
in these acts a Pagan. Indeed, nearly all our superstitions are the
remains of a religion anterior to Christianity, which that has not been
able to entirely uproot. If one would find the image of Paganism in our
day, it must be sought in some obscure village in the depth of some
out-of-the-way country.
Having as guardians a popular, vacillating tradition, and selfish
sacristans, the Pagan religion could but degenerate in worship.
Augustus, although with a certain reserve, accepted the adoration of his
subjects in the provinces. Tiberius allowed, under his own eyes, that
ignoble concourse of the cities of Asia to dispute the honor of raising
a temple to him. The extravagant impieties of Caligula produced no
re-action: outside of Judaism there was not found a single priest to
resist such follies. Coming forth, for the most part, from a primitive
worship of natural forces ten times transformed by minglings of all
sorts, and by the imagination of the peoples, the Pagan worships were
limited by their past. One could never draw from them what had never
existed in them,--Deism or instruction. The fathers of the church amuse
us when they bring to notice the misdeeds of Saturn as the father of a
family, and of Jupiter as a husband. But without doubt, it was still
more ridiculous to set up Jupiter (that is to say, the atmosphere) as a
moral god who commands, defends, rewards, and punishes. In a world which
aspires to possess a catechism, what could one do with a worship like
that of Venus, which arose from an old social necessity of the first
Ph[oe]nician navigation in the Mediterranean, but became in time an
outrage to that which one regards more and more as the essence of
religion?
Here is the explanation of that singular attraction, which, towards the
commencement of our era, drew the populations of the Old World towards
the worships of the East. These worships had something more profound
than the Greek and Latin worships: they appealed, moreover, to the
religious sentiment. Almost all were relative to the state of the soul
in another life, and they were believed to contain some pledges of
immortality. From this arose that favor which the Thracian and Sabasian
mysteries enjoyed, the worshippers of Bacchus, and brotherhoods of all
sorts. There was less of coldness in these little circles, in which one
pressed against another, than in the great glacial world elsewhere. Some
minor religions, like that of Psyche, destined solely to console for
death, had immense popularity. Those noble Egyptian worships which
concealed the emptiness within by grand splendor of ceremonies counted
their devotees throughout the empire. Isis and Serapis had their altars
at the extremities of the world. In visiting the ruins of Pompeii, one
would be tempted to believe that the worship of Isis was the principal
one practised there. Those little Egyptian temples had some assiduous
devotees, among whom were counted a large number of persons of the class
of the friends of Catullus and Tibullus. There was a service each
morning,--a sort of mass, celebrated by a tonsured and beardless priest;
there were some sprinklings of holy water, and perhaps an evening
service: it occupied, amused, and quieted. What more is necessary?
But, more than all others, the Mithraic worship enjoyed in the second
and third centuries an extraordinary popularity. I sometimes allow
myself to say, that, had not Christianity taken the lead, Mithraicism
would have become the religion of the world. Mithraicism had mysterious
re-unions, and chapels which strongly resembled little churches. It
established a very solid bond of brotherhood between its votaries; it
had the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, and bore such a resemblance to the
Christian mysteries, that the good Justin the Apologist saw only one
explanation of these resemblances: it is that Satan, in order to deceive
the human race, sought to mimic the Christian ceremonies, and committed
this plagiarism. The Mithraic tomb of the Catacombs of Rome is as
edifying and deeply mysterious as the Christian tombs. There were some
devoted Mithraists, who, even after the triumph of Christianity,
defended the sincerity of their faith with courage. The people grouped
themselves around these foreign gods: around the Greek and Italiote gods
there were no gatherings. We must say a good word for it: it is only the
small sects that lay the foundation and build up. It is so sweet to
believe one's self a little aristocracy of truth, to imagine, that, in
common with a very few, one owns the repository of truth! Such a foolish
sect in our own time gives to its adherents more consolation than a more
healthy philosophy. In his day, Abracadabra secured some joyous
followers, and, by means of a little good-will, a sublime theology has
been found in him.
* * * * *
We shall see, however, in our next conference, that the religious reign
of the future belonged neither to Serapis, nor to Mithra. The
predestined religion grew imperceptibly in Judæa. This would have
greatly astonished the most sagacious Romans, if it had been announced
to them. It would have been shocking to them in the highest degree. But
so often in history have improbable predictions become true, so often
has wisdom been mistaken, that it is not best to rely too much upon the
likes and dislikes of enlightened men, of _bons esprits_ as we say, when
they undertake to predict the future.