About the time of the Severi the religion of Europe must have presented an
aspect of surprising variety. Although dethroned, the old native Italian,
Celtic and Iberian divinities were still alive. Though eclipsed by foreign
rivals, they lived on in the devotion of the lower classes and in the
traditions of the rural districts. For a long time the Roman gods had been
established in every town and had received the homage of an official clergy
according to pontifical rites. Beside them, however, were installed the
representatives of all the Asiatic pantheons, and these received the most
fervent adoration from the masses. New powers had arrived from Asia Minor,
Egypt, Syria, and the dazzling Oriental sun outshone the stars of Italy's
temperate sky. All forms of paganism were simultaneously received and
retained while the exclusive monotheism of the Jews kept its adherents, and
Christianity strengthened its churches and fortified its orthodoxy, at the
same time giving birth to the baffling vagaries of gnosticism. A hundred
different currents carried away hesitating and undecided minds, a hundred
contrasting sermons made appeals to the conscience of the people.
Let us suppose that in modern Europe the faithful {197} 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 would be
preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a
deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation--a
confusion in which all those priests would 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.
The Oriental religions that successively gained popularity exercised a
decisive influence on the transformation of Latin paganism. Asia Minor was
the first to have its gods accepted by Italy. Since the end of the Punic
wars the black stone symbolizing the Great Mother of Pessinus had been
established on the Palatine, but only since the reign of Claudius could the
Phrygian cult freely develop in all its splendor and excesses. It
introduced a sensual, highly-colored and fanatical worship into the grave
and somber religion of the Romans. Officially recognized, it attracted and
took under its protection other foreign divinities from Anatolia and
assimilated them to Cybele and Attis, who thereafter bore the symbols of
several deities together. Cappadocian, Jewish, Persian and even Christian
influences modified the old rites of Pessinus and filled them with ideas of
spiritual purification and {198} eternal redemption by the bloody baptism
of the taurobolium. But the priests did not succeed in eliminating the
basis of coarse naturism which ancient barbaric tradition had imposed upon
them.
Beginning with the second century before our era, the mysteries of Isis and
Serapis spread over Italy with the Alexandrian culture whose religious
expression they were, and in spite of all persecution established
themselves at Rome where Caligula gave them the freedom of the city. They
did not bring with them a very advanced theological system, because Egypt
never produced anything but a chaotic aggregate of disparate doctrines, nor
a very elevated ethics, because the level of its morality--that of the
Alexandrian Greeks--rose but slowly from a low stage. But they made Italy,
and later the other Latin provinces, familiar with an ancient ritual of
incomparable charm that aroused widely different feelings with its splendid
processions and liturgic dramas. They also gave their votaries positive
assurance of a blissful immortality after death, when they would be united
with Serapis and, participating body and soul in his divinity, would live
in eternal contemplation of the gods.
At a somewhat later period arrived the numerous and varied Baals of Syria.
The great economic movement starting at the beginning of our era which
produced the colonization of the Latin world by Syrian slaves and
merchants, not only modified the material civilization of Europe, but also
its conceptions and beliefs. The Semitic cults entered into successful
competition with those of Asia Minor and Egypt. They may not have had so
stirring a liturgy, nor have been so thoroughly absorbed in preoccupation
with a future {199} life, although they taught an original eschatology, but
they did have an infinitely higher idea of divinity. The Chaldean
astrology, of which the Syrian priests were enthusiastic disciples, had
furnished them with the elements of a scientific theology. It had led them
to the notion of a God residing far from the earth above the zone of the
stars, a God almighty, universal and eternal. Everything on earth was
determined by the revolutions of the heavens according to infinite cycles
of years. It had taught them at the same time the worship of the sun, the
radiant source of earthly life and human intelligence.
The learned doctrines of the Babylonians had also imposed themselves upon
the Persian mysteries of Mithra which considered time identified with
heaven as the supreme cause, and deified the stars; but they had
superimposed themselves upon the ancient Mazdean creed without destroying
it. Thus the essential principles of the religion of Iran, the secular and
often successful rival of Greece, penetrated into the Occident under cover
of Chaldean wisdom. The Mithra worship, the last and highest manifestation
of ancient paganism, had Persian dualism for its fundamental dogma. The
world is the scene and the stake of a contest between good and evil, Ormuzd
and Ahriman, gods and demons, and from this primary conception of the
universe flowed a strong and pure system of ethics. Life is a combat;
soldiers under the command of Mithra, invincible heroes of the faith, must
ceaselessly oppose the undertakings of the infernal powers which sow
corruption broadcast. This imperative ethics was productive of energy and
formed the characteristic {200} feature distinguishing Mithraism from all
other Oriental cults.
Thus every one of the Levantine countries--and that is what we meant to
show in this brief recapitulation--had enriched Roman paganism with new
beliefs that were frequently destined to outlive it. What was the result of
this confusion of heterogeneous doctrines whose multiplicity was extreme
and whose values were very different? How did the barbaric ideas refine
themselves and combine with each other when thrown into the fiery crucible
of imperial syncretism? In other words, what shape was assumed by ancient
idolatry, so impregnated with exotic theories during the fourth century,
when it was finally dethroned? It is this point that we should like to
indicate briefly as the conclusion to these studies.
However, can we speak of _one_ pagan religion? Did not the blending of the
races result in multiplying the variety of disagreements? Had not the
confused collision of creeds produced a division into fragments, a
communication of churches? Had not a complacent syncretism engendered a
multiplication of sects? The "Hellenes," as Themistius told the Emperor
Valens, had three hundred ways of conceiving and honoring deity, who takes
pleasure in such diversity of homage.[1] In paganism a cult does not die
violently, but after long decay. A new doctrine does not necessarily
displace an older one. They may co-exist for a long time as contrary
possibilities suggested by the intellect or faith, and all opinions, all
practices, seem respectable to paganism. It never has any radical or
revolutionary transformations. Undoubtedly, the pagan beliefs of the fourth
century or earlier did not {201} have the consistency of a metaphysical
system nor the rigor of canons formulated by a council. There is always a
considerable difference between the faith of the masses and that of
cultured minds, and this difference was bound to be great in an
aristocratic empire whose social classes were sharply separated. The
devotion of the masses was as unchanging as the depths of the sea; it was
not stirred up nor heated by the upper currents.[2] The peasants practised
their pious rites over anointed stones, sacred springs and blossoming
trees, as in the past, and continued celebrating their rustic holidays
during seed-time and harvest. They adhered with invincible tenacity to
their traditional usages. Degraded and lowered to the rank of
superstitions, these were destined to persist for centuries under the
Christian orthodoxy without exposing it to serious peril, and while they
were no longer marked in the liturgic calendars they were still mentioned
occasionally in the collections of folk-lore.
At the other extreme of society the philosophers delighted in veiling
religion with the frail and brilliant tissue of their speculations. Like
the emperor Julian they improvised bold and incongruous interpretations of
the myth of the Great Mother, and these interpretations were received and
relished by a restricted circle of scholars. But during the fourth century
these vagaries of the individual imagination were nothing but arbitrary
applications of uncontested principles. During that century there was much
less intellectual anarchy than when Lucian had exposed the sects "for sale
at public auction"; a comparative harmony arose among the pagans after they
joined the opposition. One single school, that of neo-Platonism, ruled all
{202} minds. This school not only respected positive religion, as ancient
stoicism had done, but venerated it, because it saw there the expression of
an old revelation handed down by past generations. It considered the sacred
books divinely inspired--the books of Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, the
Chaldean oracles, Homer, and especially the esoteric doctrines of the
mysteries--and subordinated its theories to their teachings. As there must
be no contradiction between all the disparate traditions of different
countries and different periods, because all have emanated from one
divinity, philosophy, the _ancilla theologiae_, attempted to reconcile them
by the aid of allegory. And thus, by means of compromises between old
Oriental ideas and Greco-Latin thought, an _ensemble_ of beliefs slowly
took form, the truth of which seemed to have been established by common
consent. So when the atrophied parts of the Roman religion had been
removed, foreign elements had combined to give it a new vigor and in it
themselves became modified. This hidden work of internal decomposition and
reconstruction had unconsciously produced a religion very different from
the one Augustus had attempted to restore.
However, we would be tempted to believe that there had been no change in
the Roman faith, were we to read certain authors that fought idolatry in
those days. Saint Augustine, for instance, in his _City of God_, pleasantly
pokes fun at the multitude of Italian gods that presided over the paltriest
acts of life.[3] But the useless, ridiculous deities of the old pontifical
litanies no longer existed outside of the books of antiquaries. As a matter
of fact, the Christian polemicist's authority in this instance was Varro.
The defenders of the {203} church sought weapons against idolatry even in
Xenophanes, the first philosopher to oppose Greek polytheism. It has
frequently been shown that apologists find it difficult to follow the
progress of the doctrines which they oppose, and often their blows fall
upon dead men. Moreover, it is a fault common to all scholars, to all
imbued with book learning, that they are better acquainted with the
opinions of ancient authors than with the sentiments of their
contemporaries, and that they prefer to live in the past rather than in the
world surrounding them. It was easier to reproduce the objections of the
Epicureans and the skeptics against abolished beliefs, than to study the
defects of an active organism with a view to criticizing it. In those times
the merely formal culture of the schools caused many of the best minds to
lose their sense of reality.
The Christian polemics therefore frequently give us an inadequate idea of
paganism in its decline. When they complacently insisted upon the
immorality of the sacred legends they ignored the fact that the gods and
heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence.[4]
The writers of that period, like those of the Renaissance, regarded the
fictions of mythology as details necessary to poetical composition. They
were ornaments of style, rhetorical devices, but not the expression of a
sincere faith. Those old myths had fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute
in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures
did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed
in the compact with Mephistopheles.
So we must not be deceived by the oratorical effects {204} of a rhetorician
like Arnobius or by the Ciceronian periods of a Lactantius. In order to
ascertain the real status of the beliefs we must refer to Christian authors
who were men of letters less than they were men of action, who lived the
life of the people and breathed the air of the streets, and who spoke from
experience rather than from the treatises of mythmongers. They were high
functionaries like Prudentius;[5] like the man to whom the name
"Ambrosiaster"[6] has been given since the time of Erasmus; like the
converted pagan Firmicus Maternus,[7] who had written a treatise on
astrology before opposing "The Error of the Profane Religions"; like
certain priests brought into contact with the last adherents of idolatry
through their pastoral duties, as for instance the author of the homilies
ascribed to St. Maximus of Turin;[8] finally like the writers of anonymous
pamphlets, works prepared for the particular occasion and breathing the
ardor of all the passions of the movement.[9] If this inquiry is based on
the obscure indications in regard to their religious convictions left by
members of the Roman aristocracy who remained true to the faith of their
ancestors, like Macrobius or Symmachus; if it is particularly guided by the
exceptionally numerous inscriptions that seem to be the public expression
of the last will of expiring paganism, we shall be able to gain a
sufficiently precise idea of the condition of the Roman religion at the
time of its extinction.
One fact becomes immediately clear from an examination of those documents.
The old national religion of Rome was dead.[10] The great dignitaries still
adorned themselves with the titles of augur and quindecimvir, or of consul
and tribune, but those {205} archaic prelacies were as devoid of all real
influence upon religion as the republican magistracies were powerless in
the state. Their fall had been made complete on the day when Aurelian
established the pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, the protector of his
empire, beside and above the ancient high priests. The only cults still
alive were those of the Orient, and against them were directed the efforts
of the Christian polemics, who grew more and more bitter in speaking of
them. The barbarian gods had taken the place of the defunct immortals in
the devotion of the pagans. They alone still had empire over the soul.
With all the other "profane religions," Firmicus Maternus fought those of
the four Oriental nations. He connected them with the four elements. The
Egyptians were the worshipers of water--the water of the Nile fertilizing
their country; the Phrygians of the earth, which was to them the Great
Mother of everything; the Syrians and Carthaginians of the air, which they
adored under the name of celestial Juno;[11] the Persians of fire, to which
they attributed preeminence over the other three principles. This system
certainly was borrowed from the pagan theologians. In the common peril
threatening them, those cults, formerly rivals, had become reconciled and
regarded themselves as divisions and, so to speak, congregations, of the
same church. Each one of them was especially consecrated to one of the
elements which in combination form the universe. Their union constituted
the pantheistic religion of the deified world.
All the Oriental religions assumed the form of mysteries.[12] Their
dignitaries were at the same time pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, fathers
of Mithra, {206} celebrants of the taurobolium of the Great Mother,
prophets of Isis; in short, they had all titles imaginable. In their
initiation they received the revelation of an esoteric doctrine
strengthened by their fervor.[13] What was the theology they learned? Here
also a certain dogmatic homogeneity has established itself.
All writers agree with Firmicus that the pagans worshiped the
_elementa_.[14] Under this term were included not only the four simple
substances which by their opposition and blending caused all phenomena of
the visible world,[15] but also the stars and in general the elements of
all celestial and earthly bodies.[16]
We therefore may in a certain sense speak of the return of paganism to
nature worship; but must this transformation be regarded as a retrogression
toward a barbarous past, as a relapse to the level of primitive animism? If
so, we should be deceived by appearances. Religions do not fall back into
infancy as they grow old. The pagans of the fourth century no longer
naively considered their gods as capricious genii, as the disordered powers
of a confused natural philosophy; they conceived them as cosmic energies
whose providential action was regulated in a harmonious system. Faith was
no longer instinctive and impulsive, for erudition and reflection had
reconstructed the entire theology. In a certain sense it might be said that
theology had passed from the fictitious to the metaphysical state,
according to the formula of Comte. It was intimately connected with the
knowledge of the day, which was cherished by its last votaries with love
and pride, as faithful heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Orient and
Greece.[17] In many instances it was nothing but a religious form of the
cosmology of the {207} period. This constituted both its strength and its
weakness. The rigorous principles of astrology determined its conception of
heaven and earth.
The universe was an organism animated by a God, unique, eternal and
almighty. Sometimes this God was identified with the destiny that ruled all
things, with infinite time that regulated all visible phenomena, and he was
worshiped in each subdivision of that endless duration, especially in the
months and the seasons.[18] Sometimes, however, he was compared with a
king; he was thought of as a sovereign governing an empire, and the various
gods then were the princes and dignitaries interceding with the rulers on
behalf of his subjects whom they led in some manner into his presence. This
heavenly court had its messengers or "angels" conveying to men the will of
the master and reporting again the vows and petitions of his subjects. It
was an aristocratic monarchy in heaven as on earth.[19] A more philosophic
conception made the divinity an infinite power impregnating all nature with
its overflowing forces. "There is only one God, sole and supreme," wrote
Maximus of Madaura about 390, "without beginning or parentage, whose
energies, diffused through the world, we invoke under various names,
because we are ignorant of his real name. By successively addressing our
supplications to his different members we intend to honor him in his
entirety. Through the mediation of the subordinate gods the common father
both of themselves and of all men is honored in a thousand different ways
by mortals who are thus in accord in spite of their discord."[20]
However, this ineffable God, who comprehensively embraces everything,
manifests himself especially in {208} the resplendent brightness of the
ethereal sky.[21] He reveals his power in water and in fire, in the earth,
the sea and the blowing of the winds; but his purest, most radiant and most
active epiphany is in the stars whose revolutions determine every event and
all our actions. Above all he manifests himself in the sun, the motive
power of the celestial spheres, the inexhaustible seat of light and life,
the creator of all intelligence on earth. Certain philosophers like the
senator Praetextatus, one of the _dramatis personae_ of Macrobius,
confounded all the ancient divinities of paganism with the sun in a
thorough-going syncretism.[22]
Just as a superficial observation might lead to the belief that the
theology of the last pagans had reverted to its origin, so at first sight
the transformation of the ritual might appear like a return to savagery.
With the adoption of the Oriental mysteries barbarous, cruel and obscene
practices were undoubtedly spread, as for instance the masquerading in the
guise of animals in the Mithraic initiations, the bloody dances of the
_galli_ of the Great Mother and the mutilations of the Syrian priests.
Nature worship was originally as "amoral" as nature itself. But an ethereal
spiritualism ideally transfigured the coarseness of those primitive
customs. Just as the doctrine had become completely impregnated with
philosophy and erudition, so the liturgy had become saturated with ethical
ideas.
The taurobolium, a disgusting shower-bath of lukewarm blood, had become a
means of obtaining a new and eternal life; the ritualistic ablutions were
no longer external and material acts, but were supposed to cleanse the soul
of its impurities and to restore its original innocence; the sacred repasts
{209} imparted an intimate virtue to the soul and furnished sustenance to
the spiritual life. While efforts were made to maintain the continuity of
tradition, its content had slowly been transformed. The most shocking and
licentious fables were metamorphosed into edifying narratives by convenient
and subtle interpretations which were a joy to the learned mythographers.
Paganism had become a school of morality, the priest a doctor and director
of the conscience.[23]
The purity and holiness imparted by the practice of sacred ceremonies were
the indispensable condition for obtaining eternal life.[24] The mysteries
promised a blessed immortality to their initiates, and claimed to reveal to
them infallible means of effecting their salvation. According to a
generally accepted symbol, the spirit animating man was a spark, detached
from the fires shining in the ether; it partook of their divinity and so,
it was believed, had descended to the earth to undergo a trial. It could
literally be said that
"Man is a fallen god who still remembers heaven."
After having left their corporeal prisons, the pious souls reascended
towards the celestial regions of the divine stars, to live forever in
endless brightness beyond the starry spheres.[25]
But at the other extremity of the world, facing this luminous realm,
extended the somber kingdom of evil spirits. They were irreconcilable
adversaries of the gods and men of good will, and constantly left the
infernal regions to roam about the earth and scatter evil. With the aid of
the celestial spirits, the faithful had to struggle forever against their
designs and seek to avert their anger by means of bloody sacrifices. {210}
But, with the help of occult and terrible processes, the magician could
subject them to his power and compel them to serve his purposes. This
demonology, the monstrous offspring of Persian dualism, favored the rise of
every superstition.[26]
However, the reign of the evil powers was not to last forever. According to
common opinion the universe would be destroyed by fire[27] after the times
had been fulfilled. All the wicked would perish, but the just would be
revived and establish the reign of universal happiness in the regenerated
world.[28]
The foregoing is a rapid sketch of the theology of paganism after three
centuries of Oriental influence. From coarse fetichism and savage
superstitions the learned priests of the Asiatic cults had gradually
produced a complete system of metaphysics and eschatology, as the Brahmins
built up the spiritualistic monism of the Vedanta beside the monstrous
idolatry of Hinduism, or, to confine our comparisons to the Latin world, as
the jurists drew from the traditional customs of primitive tribes the
abstract principles of a legal system that governs the most cultivated
societies. This religion was no longer like that of ancient Rome, a mere
collection of propitiatory and expiatory rites performed by the citizen for
the good of the state; it now pretended to offer to all men a
world-conception which gave rise to a rule of conduct and placed the end of
existence in the future life. It was more unlike the worship that Augustus
had attempted to restore than the Christianity that fought it. The two
opposed creeds moved in the same intellectual and moral sphere,[29] and one
could actually pass from one to the other without shock or interruption.
Sometimes when {211} reading the long works of the last Latin writers, like
Ammianus Marcellinus or Boëthius, or the panegyrics of the official
orators,[30] scholars could well ask whether their authors were pagan or
Christian. In the time of Symmachus and Praetextatus, the members of the
Roman aristocracy who had remained faithful to the gods of their ancestors
did not have a mentality or morality very different from that of adherents
of the new faith who sat with them in the senate. The religious and
mystical spirit of the Orient had slowly overcome the whole social organism
and had prepared all nations to unite in the bosom of a universal church.
* * * * *
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