League, which, in conformity with the division of the pupils in the
School, comprised Exoterics and Esoterics. The Esoteric members of the
League were, no doubt, the students admitted to the higher classes, as
well as the graduates of the school: probably the number of these never
exceeded 300. But to become an Exoteric member of the League, anyone was
qualified who was a follower of the Philosopher, and who was ready to
live according to his teaching and to spread the knowledge of the
doctrine abroad: of these there may have been several thousand. Their
mode of life was left to their discretion, while, on the contrary, the
Esoterici were bound by strict rules. They lived in the Coenobium,
always wore clothes of white linen, washed and bathed daily in cold
water, at their common board abstained from the meats and drinks
forbidden by the Master, and put in practice his doctrine. They divided
the day among their various duties, meditating, mornings, how they might
employ the hours most profitably, and evenings questioning themselves
how their good resolutions had been kept. Harmony, that foundation-idea
of the Pythagorean doctrine, was the lodestar of their lives. They
studied to be just toward all men, toward the erring strict and kindly,
faithful to friends and yokemates, to the law submissive, toward the
unfortunate charitable, temperate in their pleasures; to keep their
plighted word, and in their behavior to set a good example to all men.
The League is said to have comprised several sections, but whether the
sections were “degrees” rising one above another, or whether they were
co-ordinate branches, is not clear. We hear of Mathematici, who devoted
themselves specially to the sciences, of Theoretici, who were professors
of ethics, of Politici, concerned with government, of Sebastici, whose
province was religion. The religion of the Pythagoreans seems to have
been compounded of doctrines of the ancient popular religion of the
Greeks, of the mysteries, and of the monotheism of the Egyptian priests;
and it had a secret cult, with elaborate ceremonial of initiation, the
purpose of which, however, was to enforce the teaching of the Master.
The political principles of the Pythagoreans favored a transformation of
the Dorian oligarchism into an aristocratism of culture. Democracy they
hated. Their aim was to acquire for themselves powerful influence in the
state, to fill the public offices with their own members, and to
administer government according to their Master’s ideas. As matter of
fact, they appear to have attained these ends fully or approximately in
Crotona, Locri, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other cities of Magna Graecia.
There is no doubt that the secrets that the Pythagoreans were sworn to
keep had reference to these political aims. To bar out the uninitiated
the members are said to have had a badge, a five-pointed star
(pentagrammon, pentalpha) and to have employed a symbolic form of
speech, by means of which they concealed their secrets under cover of
apparently trivial words, or words not to be understood by outsiders.
But the League of the Sage of Crotona, after a glorious, though brief,
ascendency, had a tragic end. The cities of Magna Graecia had grown rich
by commerce, and with wealth and ease had come great corruption of
manners. In Sybaris the lower classes of citizens—artisans and
shopkeepers—rose in revolt, and five hundred patricians were banished,
their property seized by the people, and the popular leader Telys
administered the government in their stead. The exiles took refuge in
Crotona, and there, according to Grecian custom, sitting around the
altar in the agora, or market-place, implored the aid of that city, then
ruled by the Pythagoreans. Thus for two reasons the rulers of Crotona
were objects of hate to the tyrannos of Sybaris: they were the enemies
of democracy, and they were protectors of the exiled oligarchs. He,
therefore, demanded of Crotona surrender of the fugitives. The demand
having been refused (at the urgent instance of Pythagoras it is said),
war followed. A desperate battle was fought, and the Crotoniats, though
inferior in number, were victorious (510 B. C.). Sybaris fell into their
hands, and was looted without mercy, and the town leveled with the
ground: in fact, a stream was made to flow through the once magnificent
city.
This atrocious deed, which though no consequence of Pythagorean
teaching, was nevertheless a consequence of Pythagorean exclusiveness
and Pythagorean contempt for the people, had its nemesis. The democratic
spirit, so mortally offended, took an equally atrocious revenge. In
Crotona, too, as before in Sybaris, the democracy took action, and
demanded a division of the conquered Sybarite territory among all the
citizens of Crotona, and equal suffrage for all in the election of the
rulers. At the head of the democracy stood Cylon, an enemy of the
Pythagoreans. The aged Master, because of the hostility manifested
toward him personally, was obliged to flee from the scene of his great
labors. It is supposed that he died at Metapontum, hard on a hundred
years old. In Crotona the strife of parties went on. The government
unwisely rejected the demands of the democrats, and thereupon, about the
middle of the fifth century B. C., the storm burst. The rage of the
oppressed and despised people was vented first upon the Pythagoreans, a
great number of whom were assembled in the house of Milo. The house was
taken by storm, the assemblage butchered either on the spot or in
flight, and their property distributed among the people. Aristocracy was
also overthrown in Tarentum, Metapontum, and Locri. The Pythagorean
League was annihilated, and its religious and political labors
disappeared, leaving no trace.
3. THE ORPHICI.
The scattered fragments of the Pythagorean League attached themselves to
another association, that of the Orphici, named after the fabled singer
Orpheus. This curious association, a fantastic compound of the mysteries
and Pythagorism, is rightly credited to Onomacritus, apostle and
reformer of the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries, who lived in the
time of the Athenian tyrannos Pisistratus: he was high in the favor of
Pisistratus, and enjoyed much celebrity. By some of his contemporaries,
men of sense and not easily imposed on, he was suspected of palming off
his own compositions for poems of Orpheus (who never existed); but
probably he did this without intent to deceive, but simply because of
his irresistible passion for the mummery of secret societies and
mysteries. This adventurer and mystic, who understood very well the
meaning of the mysteries and the uses to which they could be turned, was
one of the first to speak out the thought hidden in them: that man was
born in sin and fallen away from God, and that he cannot be saved till
grace shall be afforded him. His doctrine was just Pietism, with this
exception, that instead of “the lord Jesus” we have here the god
Dionysos, or the Iacchos of the mysteries, or Orpheus. Such inane
babblement as this, and such doctrines as that the soul of man is
confined in the body as in a prison, that the world is for it a vale of
tears and a place of banishment, that it is pining and longing to return
to its true home, Heaven, are an offense to the joyous spirit of Greece,
an outrage against her religion of beauty, truth, and virtue, the last
blow dealt at Grecian art and science. The outcome of them was a
tedious, voluminous “Orphic literature” consisting of mythological poems
full of mysticism and sentimentality.
The Orphic societies were not, like the mysteries, great assemblages of
people in temples, but, after the Pythagorean pattern, secret schools or
clubs; and they followed, at least ostensibly, the Pythagorean rule of
life, abstaining from fleshmeat, beans, and wine; but with this they
coupled two cults in themselves incompatible, that of the ideal god
Apollo, and that of the sensual deity Dionysos. But being stript of the
semi-public and official character attaching to the mysteries, and of
the philosophic dignity of the Pythagorean sect, the Orphic societies
became simply nests of swindlers and mendicants; and vagabond priests,
Orpheotelestae, admitted to their ridiculous degrees, for a
consideration, every credulous aid marvel-gobbeting postulant; there
were even victims who had themselves with wife and children initiated
every month. Other tricksters combined the Orphic cult with the Phrygian
cult of Cybele, mother of the gods, and with that of Sabazios: these
were known as Metragyrtae (mother-beggars) or Menagyrtae (monthly
beggars). These and their like were regular mountebanks, giving out that
they had the power of curing the insane, their method being to dance and
caper around the patient to the sound of timbrels, the while
flagellating themselves: for this they took up a little collection. One
of these metragyrtae was capitally punished at Athens in the middle of
the fifth century B. C.: but the judges, seized by remorse, questioned
the oracle, and got response that in atonement they should build a
temple to the Great Mother: thereupon the followers of the dead juggler
were set free. A priestess of Sabazios, Ninus by name, was also put to
death for brewing philters: she was the one sole victim of witchcraft
trials in all antiquity. Thus did the Orphic sect in Greece degenerate
to the same low estate as the mysteries, despised by all honest and
enlightened men.
But both the mysteries and the Orphic as well as Pythagorean societies
were links in a chain of phenomena that reached all through Grecian
antiquity, indicating plainly a reaction against the popular religion,
and an effort to introduce essentially different religious views—views
which in aftertimes, in an improved form, were to triumph definitely
over the Olympian gods.
4. MYSTERIOUS PERSONAGES OF ANCIENT TIMES.
In antiquity we are able to distinguish three religious systems, viz.,
polytheism, monotheism, mysticism. The first was a deification of
nature: and as nature manifests herself in various forces, the religion,
too, had to postulate a multitude of deities. This is the system of the
Oriental and Graeco-Roman popular religion; and in these its two
branches it is again differentiated by the fact that on the one side it
assumed a gloomy, awe-inspiring character, while on the other side it
wore a joyous aspect, inviting to mirth and pleasure. The second system
rested on a total separation of God from nature, and thus it acquired a
monotonous, one-sided character of abstruseness, without any feeling for
form and beauty: it was the system of the Egyptian priests and of the
Israelites, and in after times passed over into Mohammedanism and some
Christian sects as Unitarianism, etc. The third system also postulated
the separation of God and nature, but it was not a definitive
separation, for there was hope of a reconciliation; it consisted,
therefore, in a sense of alienation from God, and in an incessant
longing for reunion with him. This system found embodiment in the
Grecian mysteries and the Pythagoreo-Orphic societies, and later in
“positive” Christianity: it was neither absolutely polytheistic nor
absolutely monotheistic, but compact of these two systems, in that it
contemplated many gods embraced under one form, or one god manifested in
sundry forms. Even in the myths underlying the Eleusinian mysteries we
have a conversion of the gods, especially Demeter and Dionysos, into
human form and a resurrection and ascension of Persephone; an important
part was played in the same mysteries by the bread and wine employed for
religious purposes, by the purifications in water, and by the fasts
observed; in the Bacchic mysteries Orpheus, Zagreus, and others appear
as suffering and dying demigods; in the Orphic rites there is allusion
to the natural sinfulness of man, and to grace and redemption; in the
mysteries of Cybele sexual continence is commended as highly
meritorious; in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean sect, even as in
Christianity, the bodily life is regarded as an evil, an incorporeal
immortality of the soul as true bliss, stress is laid on the soul’s
delights, and on the punishment of the wicked, whereas, in polytheism
the soul after death is but a shadow; and many are the other points of
contact between those systems and Christianism, which, being of a more
general nature, have not yet been mentioned in these pages, for example,
certain mysterious and enigmatical personages who have remained hitherto
quite unnoticed, except by the learned.
Commonly schools and the books give information only about the
officially recognized Olympian gods, and perhaps the gods of sea and
netherworld; but the “Best God,” in Greek Aristaios, is passed over in
silence, just because one knows not what to make of him. This Aristaios
passed for a son of Apollo the god of light. Held apart from the
“scandalous chronicles” and naughty gossip that was in circulation
around the rest of the gods, he was represented as inventor of
sheep-husbandry, bee-keeping, the production of oil from the olive,
etc., as man’s helper in drought and aridity, practicer of leechcraft
(like his brother Aesculapius), subduer of the winds, originator of
rites, laws, and sciences. As the little vogue of his name would
indicate, he was less honored on the Grecian terra firma than in the
Hellenic islands and colonies, and there ofttimes was joined with the
father of the gods, as Zeus-Aristaios (particularly in his role of
protector of the bees), with the god of light as Aristaios-Apollon, with
the god of fertility as Aristaios-Dionysos. In the island Ceos he was
the most highly reverenced of all the gods. Thus we see in Aristaios a
conception of one almighty, allwise god, transcending all the
conceptions of polytheism, and all the gods in human form worshiped by
ancient Greece.
Now plainly Aristeas and Aristaios are one same name. Among the ancient
Greeks there was a mythical personage named Aristeas. He was Apollo’s
priest, as his paronymus was Apollo’s son. According to Herodotus (IV.
13–15) Aristeas was of Proconnesus, an isle in the Propontis (sea of
Marmora), son of Castrobius; in the sacred trance received the
inspiration of Apollo, journeyed into Scythia (north of the Black Sea),
and died in his native place, in a fulling-mill. The place having been
closed after his death, a citizen of the neighboring town of Cyzicus who
happened to be passing, declared that he had just before met Aristeas in
that town and spoken with him. The mill door was then opened, but no
trace of Aristeas was there. Seven years afterward he appeared again in
Proconnesus, there composed poems on his journey to Scythia (which
Herodotus read), and disappeared a second time. But 340 years later he
was seen at Metapontum, in lower Italy, where he ordered the citizens to
erect to Apollo a statue with his name; then he disappeared for good. On
questioning the oracle at Delphi what they should do, the burghers of
Metapontum were counseled to obey the precept of Aristeas; which they
did. Herodotus saw the statue surrounded by laurel trees. This “Best of
Men,” ever reappearing, and anon disappearing, without leaving any
vestige of bodily presence, is no doubt evidence of a pre-Christian need
of a son of god rising from the dead and ascending into heaven; as far
as it goes, it is also an argument for the reality of resurrection from
the dead and for the union of the divine and human.
But not only occurrences which call to mind the Christian Son of God,
but even his very name appears in Grecian antiquity; and indeed the name
antedates the occurrences. Homer (Odyssey, V. 125), and Hesiod (Theogony
969) mention Jasion or Jasios (names closely resembling the Hebrew
Joshua and Jesus), a son of Zeus, who had a sister Harmonia, and who
with the goddess Demeter (the earth, or fertility) produced out of a
thrice-plowed field Plutus (wealth): meaning that the discoverer of
husbandry became discoverer of thrift. But in punishment of his
sacrilegious love of a goddess Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt,
yet at the same time assigned him a place among the gods. As beloved of
the Eleusinian goddess, Jasios, after initiation into the mysteries by
Zeus himself, became the indefatigable herald of the mystic doctrines.
Says Diodorus (V. 49): “Wealth is a gift imparted through the
intermediation of Jasios.... It is known of all that these gods
(Demeter, Jasios, and Plutos), when invoked amid dangers by the
initiated straightway offered them help; and whoso hath part in the
mysteries, the same will be more devout, more upright, and in every
respect better.” Thus does Jasion figure as son of the highest god, as
himself raised to divine honors, as a wandering apostle of religion, and
as the source of all good fortune. His name is equivalent to “savior,”
“healer,” being from the same root as iatros (healer), and the verb
iaomai (to heal, cure). Compare Iao, the Greek form of the Hebrew divine
name Yahve or Jehova; also Iacchos, and Jason (i. e., Iason).
Thus in mystic Hellenism we find the basic ideas of the later system of
divine incarnation and human deification, of redemption, etc.; and there
can be no doubt that we must seek in the Grecian mysteries for one of
the sources of Christianism.
_PART FOURTH_.
_Son of Man. Son of God._
1. HELLENISM AND JUDAISM.
If one attends solely to the fact that the founder of the Christian
religion was a Jew, and that not only he executed his mission in Judea,
but took Judaism for the basis of his teaching, the assertion made in
the preceding section, viz.: that the sources of Christianism are to be
sought in the Grecian mysteries, may appear singular. But the apparent
contradiction disappears at once when we reflect that long before
Christ’s day Judaism was thoroughly yeasted with Grecian elements; and
that after his death the work of propagating his system was done far
more largely by Greeks and men of Grecian education than by Jews. We
will not only prove that this was so, but also will show that the
Christianism of Christians is at root and in substance a totally
different thing from the Christianism of Jesus.
Sharper contrast can hardly be than that between the Grecian and the
Jewish character. On one side closest union between God and world: on
the other, widest divulsion; on one side most untiring research and the
finest sense of art-form: on the other only theology and religious
poetry; on the one side a priesthood that makes no pretension, and has
little or no influence: on the other a nation ruled by priests; the
Greeks maintaining an active commerce with all the world, their ships
traversing the seas, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the remotest angle
of the Euxine: Judea sealed against all access from without, against
every ship that touched at Joppa, against every caravan from the desert;
in Greece eager seizing of everything new and readiness to reject what
is antiquated: in Judea holding fast to what is old and mistrust of all
change.
These fundamentally different elements were fated to come in mutual
contact. Ever since their liberation from Babylonian captivity by the
decree of Cyrus, the Jews, both those who remained in the region of
Euphrates and Tigris and the small number of them who returned to the
native land, had lived under the Persian sceptre, and therefore after
the conquest of Persia by Alexander, were exposed to the powerful
influence of Grecian culture. The Jews were scattered still more in
consequence of the wars between Alexander’s successors: soon they were
to be found in every port and every isle of the Mediterranean as far as
Spain; on the edge of the Asian and African deserts; and after this
dispersion (in Greek, diaspora), they became a shopkeeping or mercantile
race. But nowhere outside Palestine were they so numerous as in Egypt
and its splendid new capital, Alexandria, seat of Grecian art,
literature and learning. They enjoyed large privileges in Egypt; and
they erected at Leontopolis a temple, after the model of the temple at
Jerusalem. But though the Jews of the Diaspora, thanks to their laws
regarding foods and the Sabbath, their possession of the Scriptures,
their undiminished reverence for the Temple of Jerusalem, and the
obligation laid on every Jew to pilgrim thither once at least, remained
most firmly attached to the religion of their fathers, nevertheless in
many places they adopted the language (usually Greek) of the locality in
which they lived, so that a special “Hellenist” synagogue had to be
erected at Jerusalem for the sake of visiting Jews who understood only
Greek. But nowhere did Jews adopt the Grecian customs and language so
unreservedly as at Alexandria, and it was there that between the years
B. C. 280 and 220 the Pentateuch was translated into Greek. This
translation still is styled the Septuagint (Latin, Septuaginta, Greek,
Heptekonta, both meaning seventy), in accordance with the old fable that
in the work were employed seventy-two translators, being six from each
of the twelve Israelitish tribes; and that while each of the seventy-two
translated the whole of the five “books of Moses,” the several versions
agreed verbatim, literatim, punctatim. In later times the remainder of
the Hebrew Bible was translated (about 125 B. C.).
In Alexandria scholars who were not Jews found in the Septuagint an
introduction to Jewish theology; the Hellenist Jews, from their
acquaintance with the literature of Greece, became conversant with
Grecian philosophy. Greeks began to admire the wisdom of Moses, Jews to
study Plato and Aristotle; and the enlightened polytheism of the one
concurred with the monotheism of the others, in developing a new
mysticism. In this mysticism of the Alexandrines it was that the idea of
Divine Revelation had its origin—an idea before unknown, but now
suddenly taken up by these enthusiasts, and applied, on the one side to
the Old Testament, and on the other side to the Greek philosophers. The
Jew Aristobulus, founder of this school of thought, by means of an
allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, traced to that source
all the wisdom of the Greeks; and Philo, greatest of the Jewish
philosophers, contemporary with Jesus, though he knew nothing of his
life or doctrine, so spiritualized the tradition of his race as to see
in the four rivers of Eden the four cardinal virtues, in the trees of
Paradise the other virtues, in the patriarchs and heroes of Israel only
personifications of various moral conceptions: all in the Grecian
manner. According to Philo, before he created the world, God made a
world of ideas, which found its centre of unity in his Word (logos); the
corporeal world was made after the model of this ideal world. The logos
was God’s first work, the world his second: this passed afterward into
the gospel called of John: “In the beginning was the word,” etc. He
understood the history of man’s creation to mean that the first human
creature was immortal, ideal, perfect, but that by the creation of woman
he was made sinful, imperfect. Philo took the idea of immortality from
the Grecian philosophy rather than from the ancient Jewish doctrines;
and with Pythagoras he regards the soul’s union with the body as a
punishment. He therefore taught that man should free himself as much as
possible from this burdensome association, that is, should despise sense
and live entirely in the thought of God, that so he might obtain
release. One should think such views are inconsistent with the laws of
man’s nature, and so in truth they are; but nevertheless in Philo’s day
there existed a society that aimed to fashion their life in accordance
with these opinions.
2. THE ESSENES.
Such a society was the order or sect of the Essenes, who traced their
origin back to high antiquity, but whose doctrines really were first put
forth about the year 100 B. C. The Grecizing Jew Josephus makes them a
“third party,” standing between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But the
Essenes, as such, had nothing to do with the political questions at
issue between the two principal parties. The Essenes constituted a
secret society.