Franz Cumont, born January 3, 1868, and educated at Ghent, Bonn, Berlin,
and Paris, resides in Brussels, and has been Professor in the University of
Ghent since 1892. His monumental work, _Textes et monuments figurés
relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_, published in 1896 and 1899 in two
volumes, was followed in 1902 by the separate publication, under the title
_Les Mystères de Mithra_, of the second half of Vol. I, the _Conclusions_
in which he interpreted the great mass of evidence contained in the
remainder of the work. The year following, this book appeared in the
translation of Thomas J. McCormack as _The Mysteries of Mithra_, published
by the Open Court Publishing Company. M. Cumont's other work of prime
interest to students of the ancient faiths, _Les religions orientales dans
le paganisme romain_, appeared in 1906, was revised and issued in a second
edition in 1909, and is now presented in English in the following pages.
M. Cumont is an ideal contributor to knowledge in his chosen field. As an
investigator, he combines in one person Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic
intuition. As a writer, his virtues are no less pronounced. Recognition of
his mastery of an enormous array of detailed learning followed immediately
on the publication {vi} of _Textes et monuments_, and the present series of
essays, besides a numerous series of articles and monographs, makes
manifest the same painstaking and thorough scholarship; but he is something
more than the mere _savant_ who has at command a vast and difficult body of
knowledge. He is also the literary architect who builds up his material
into well-ordered and graceful structure.
Above all, M. Cumont is an interpreter. In _The Mysteries of Mithra_ he put
into circulation, so to speak, the coin of the ideas he had minted in the
patient and careful study of _Textes et Monuments_; and in the studies of
_The Oriental Religions_ he is giving to the wider public the
interpretation of the larger and more comprehensive body of knowledge of
which his acquaintance with the religion of Mithra is only a part, and
against which as a background it stands. What his book _The Mysteries of
Mithra_ is to his special knowledge of Mithraism, _The Oriental Religions_
is to his knowledge of the whole field. He is thus an example of the
highest type of scholar--the exhaustive searcher after evidence, and the
sympathetic interpreter who mediates between his subject and the lay
intellectual life of his time.
And yet, admirable as is M. Cumont's presentation in _The Mysteries of
Mithra_ and _The Oriental Religions_, nothing is a greater mistake than to
suppose that his popularizations are facile reading. The few specialists in
ancient religions may indeed sail smoothly in the current of his thought;
but the very nature of a subject which ramifies so extensively and so
intricately into the whole of ancient life, concerning itself with
practically all the manifestations of ancient {vii}
civilization--philosophy, religion, astrology, magic, mythology,
literature, art, war, commerce, government--will of necessity afford some
obstacle to readers unfamiliar with the study of religion.
It is in the hope of lessening somewhat this natural difficulty of
assimilating M. Cumont's contribution to knowledge, and above all, to life,
that these brief words of introduction are undertaken. The presentation in
outline of the main lines of thought which underlie his conception of the
importance of the Oriental religions in universal history may afford the
uninitiated reader a background against which the author's depiction of the
various cults of the Oriental group will be more easily and clearly seen.
M. Cumont's work, then, transports us in imagination to a time when
Christianity was still--at least in the eyes of Roman pagans--only one of a
numerous array of foreign Eastern religions struggling for recognition in
the Roman world, and especially in the city of Rome. To understand the
conditions under which the new faith finally triumphed, we should first
realize the number of these religions, and the apparently chaotic condition
of paganism when viewed as a system.
"Let us suppose," says M. Cumont, "that in modern Europe the faithful had
deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the
precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let
us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian
mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits
should all be preaching fatalism and {viii} predestination,
ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and
deliverance through annihilation--a confusion in which all those priests
should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate
their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which the future may perhaps
realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in
which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine."
But it is no less necessary to realize, in the second place, that, had
there not been an essential solidarity of all these different faiths, the
triumph of Christianity would have been achieved with much less difficulty
and in much less time. We are not to suppose that religions are long-lived
and tenacious unless they possess something vital which enables them to
resist. In his chapter on "The Transformation of Roman Paganism," M. Cumont
thus accounts for the vitality of the old faiths: "The mass of religions at
Rome finally became so impregnated by neo-Platonism and Orientalism that
paganism may be called a single religion with a fairly distinct theology,
whose doctrines were somewhat as follows: adoration of the elements,
especially the cosmic bodies; the reign of one God, eternal and omnipotent,
with messenger attendants; spiritual interpretation of the gross rites yet
surviving from primitive times; assurance of eternal felicity to the
faithful; belief that the soul was on earth to be proved before its final
return to the universal spirit, of which it was a spark; the existence of
an abysmal abode for the evil, against whom the faithful must keep up an
unceasing struggle; the destruction of the universe, {ix} the death of the
wicked, and the eternal happiness of the good in a reconstructed world."[1]
If this formulation of pagan doctrine surprises those who have been told
that paganism was "a fashion rather than a faith," and are accustomed to
think of it in terms of Jupiter and Juno, Venus and Mars, and the other
empty, cold, and formalized deities that have so long filled literature and
art, it will be because they have failed to take into account that between
Augustus and Constantine three hundred years elapsed, and are unfamiliar
with the very natural fact that during all that long period the character
of paganism was gradually undergoing change and growth. "The faith of the
friends of Symmachus," M. Cumont tells us, "was much farther removed from
the religious ideal of Augustus, although they would never have admitted
it, than that of their opponents in the senate."
To what was due this change in the content of the pagan ideal, so great
that the phraseology in which the ideal is described puts us in mind of
Christian doctrine itself? First, answers M. Cumont, to neo-Platonism,
which attempted the reconciliation of the antiquated religions with the
advanced moral and intellectual ideas of its own time by spiritual
interpretation of outgrown cult stories and cult practices. A second and
more vital cause, however, wrought to bring about the same result. This was
the invasion of the Oriental religions, and the slow working, from the
advent of the Great Mother of the Gods in B. C. 204 to the downfall of
paganism at the end of the fourth {x} century of the Christian era, of the
leaven of Oriental sentiment. The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap
between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make
the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution. The Great
Mother and Attis, with self-consecration, enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis
and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the
omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the
Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of the sun, with the
Persian dualism of good and evil, and with after-death rewards and
punishments--all these, and more, flowed successively into the channel of
Roman life and mingled their waters to form the late Roman paganism which
proved so pertinacious a foe to the Christian religion. The influence that
underlay their pretensions was so real that there is some warrant for the
view of Renan that at one time it was doubtful whether the current as it
flowed away into the Dark Ages should be Mithraic or Christian.
The vitalization of the evidence regarding these cults is M. Cumont's great
contribution. His perseverance in the accurate collection of material is
equalled only by his power to see the real nature and effect of the
religions of which he writes. Assuming that no religion can succeed merely
because of externals, but must stand on some foundation of moral
excellence, he shows how the pagan faiths were able to hold their own, and
even to contest the ground with Christianity. These religions, he asserts,
gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to
the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience. "The spread of
the Oriental religions"--again I quote {xi} a summary from _Classical
Philology_--"was due to merit. In contrast to the cold and formal religions
of Rome, the Oriental faiths, with their hoary traditions and basis of
science and culture, their fine ceremonial, the excitement attendant on
their mysteries, their deities with hearts of compassion, their cultivation
of the social bond, their appeal to conscience and their promises of
purification and reward in a future life, were personal rather than civic,
and satisfied the individual soul.... With such a conception of latter-day
paganism, we may more easily understand its strength and the bitter rivalry
between it and the new faith, as well as the facility with which pagan
society, once its cause was proved hopeless, turned to Christianity." The
Oriental religions had made straight the way. Christianity triumphed after
long conflict because its antagonists also were not without weapons from
the armory of God. Both parties to the struggle had their loins girt about
with truth, and both wielded the sword of the spirit; but the steel of the
Christian was the more piercing, the breastplate of his righteousness was
the stronger, and his feet were better shod with the preparation of the
gospel of peace.
Nor did Christianity stop there. It took from its opponents their own
weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to
the new religion. "As the religious history of the empire is studied more
closely," writes M. Cumont, "the triumph of the church will, in our
opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of
beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its
greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile
superstitions, if we {xii} know the moral antecedents of the world in which
it developed."
M. Cumont is therefore a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity
of history. Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation,
but a composite of slow and laborious growth. Its four centuries of
struggle were not a struggle against an entirely unworthy religion, else
would our faith in its divine warrant be diminished; it is to its own great
credit, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that
it finally overwhelmed them. To quote Emil Aust: "Christianity did not wake
into being the religious sense, but it afforded that sense the fullest
opportunity of being satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect
must give place to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and
vice. It had out of its own strength laid out the ways by which it advanced
to lose itself in the arms of Christianity, and to recognize this does not
mean to minimize the significance of Christianity. We are under no
necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the
Evangel streams into it brightly enough without this."[2]
Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient
Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger
intellectual movement. Their effort is only one manifestation of the
interest of recent years in the study of universal religion; other
manifestations of the same interest are to be seen in the histories of the
Greek and Roman religions by {xiii} Gruppe, Farnell, and Wissowa, in the
anthropological labors of Tylor, Lang, and Frazer, in the publication of
Reinach's _Orpheus_, in the study of comparative religion, and in such a
phenomenon as a World's Parliament of Religions.
In a word, M. Cumont and his companion ancient Orientalists are but one
brigade engaged in the modern campaign for the liberation of religious
thought. His studies are therefore not concerned alone with paganism, nor
alone with the religions of the ancient past; in common with the labors of
students of modern religion, they touch our own faith and our own times,
and are in vital relation with our philosophy of living, and consequently
with our highest welfare. "To us moderns," says Professor Frazer in the
preface to his _Golden Bough_, "a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a
greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us
the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly
gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow
the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to
civilization.... But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions
of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an
enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the
learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite
progress...."
It is possible that all this might disquiet the minds of those who have
been wont to assume perfection in the primitive Christian church, and who
assume also that present-day Christianity is the ultimate form of the
Christian religion. Such persons--if there are {xiv} such--should rather
take heart from the whole-souled devotion to truth everywhere to be seen in
the works of scholars in ancient religion, and from their equally evident
sympathy with all manifestations of human effort to establish the divine
relation; but most of all from their universal testimony that for all time
and in all places and under all conditions the human heart has felt
powerfully the need of the divine relation. From the knowledge that the
desire to get right with God--the common and essential element in all
religions--has been the most universal and the most potent and persistent
factor in past history, it is not far to the conviction that it will always
continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of
religion pure and undefiled will never perish from the earth.