for generations the mock of the sceptic, and in his own day furnished
abundant ammunition for the artillery of Christian polemic. He takes
first Hesiod's story of Kronos swallowing his children; then the
Judgement of Paris; then comes a long and earnest explanation of the
myth of Attis and the Mother of the Gods. It is on the face of it a
story highly discreditable both to the heart and the head of those
august beings, and though the rites themselves do not seem to have been
in any way improper, the Christians naturally attacked the Pagans and
Julian personally for countenancing the worship. Sallustius's
explanation is taken directly from Julian's fifth oration in praise of
the Great Mother, and reduces the myth and the ritual to an expression
of the adventures of the Soul seeking God.
So much for the whole traditional mythology. It has been explained
completely away and made subservient to philosophy and edification,
while it can still be used as a great well-spring of religious emotion.
For the explanations given by Sallustius and Julian are never
rationalistic. They never stimulate a spirit of scepticism, always a
spirit of mysticism and reverence. And, lest by chance even this
reverent theorizing should have been somehow lacking in insight or true
piety, Sallustius ends with the prayer: 'When I say these things
concerning the myths, may the gods themselves and the spirits of those
who wrote the myths be gracious to me.'
He now leaves mythology and turns to the First Cause. It must be one,
and it must be present in all things. Thus, it cannot be Life, for, if
it were, all things would be alive. By a Platonic argument in which he
will still find some philosophers to follow him, he proves that
everything which exists, exists because of some goodness in it; and thus
arrives at the conclusion that the First Cause is τὸ ἀγαθόν, the Good.
The gods are emanations or forces issuing from the Good; the makers of
this world are secondary gods; above them are the makers of the makers,
above all the One.
Next comes a proof that the world is eternal--a very important point of
doctrine; next that the soul is immortal; next a definition of the
workings of Divine Providence, Fate, and Fortune--a fairly skilful piece
of dialectic dealing with a hopeless difficulty. Next come Virtue and
Vice, and, in a dead and perfunctory echo of Plato's _Republic_, an
enumeration of the good and bad forms of human society. The questions
which vibrated with life in free Athens had become meaningless to a
despot-governed world. Then follows more adventurous matter.
First a chapter headed: 'Whence Evil things come, and that there is no
_Phusis Kakou_--Evil is not a real thing.' 'It is perhaps best', he
says, 'to observe at once that, since the gods are good and make
everything, there is no positive evil; there is only absence of good;
just as there is no positive darkness, only absence of light.'
What we call 'evils' arise only in the activities of men, and even here
no one ever does evil for the sake of evil. 'One who indulges in some
pleasant vice thinks the vice bad but his pleasure good; a murderer
thinks the murder bad, but the money he will get by it, good; one who
injures an enemy thinks the injury bad, but the being quits with his
enemy, good'; and so on. The evil acts are all done for the sake of some
good, but human souls, being very far removed from the original flawless
divine nature, make mistakes or sins. One of the great objects of the
world, he goes on to explain, of gods, men, and spirits, of religious
institutions and human laws alike, is to keep the souls from these
errors and to purge them again when they have fallen.
Next comes a speculative difficulty. Sallustius has called the world
'eternal in the fullest sense'--that is, it always has been and always
will be. And yet it is 'made' by the gods. How are these statements
compatible? If it was made, there must have been a time before it was
made. The answer is ingenious. It is not made by handicraft as a table
is; it is not begotten as a son by a father. It is the result of a
quality of God just as light is the result of a quality of the sun. The
sun causes light, but the light is there as soon as the sun is there.
The world is simply the other side, as it were, of the goodness of God,
and has existed as long as that goodness has existed.
Next come some simpler questions about man's relation to the gods. In
what sense do we say that the gods are angry with the wicked or are
appeased by repentance? Sallustius is quite firm. The gods cannot ever
be glad--for that which is glad is also sorry; cannot be angry--for
anger is a passion; and obviously they cannot be appeased by gifts or
prayers. Even men, if they are honest, require higher motives than that.
God is unchangeable, always good, always doing good. If we are good, we
are nearer to the gods, and we feel it; if we are evil, we are separated
further from them. It is not they that are angry, it is our sins that
hide them from us and prevent the goodness of God from shining into us.
If we repent, again, we do not make any change in God; we only, by the
conversion of our soul towards the divine, heal our own badness and
enjoy again the goodness of the gods. To say that the gods turn away
from the wicked, would be like saying that the sun turns away from a
blind man.
Why then do we make offerings and sacrifices to the gods, when the gods
need nothing and can have nothing added to them? We do so in order to
have more communion with the gods. The whole temple service, in fact, is
an elaborate allegory, a representation of the divine government of the
world.
The custom of sacrificing animals had died out some time before this.
The Jews of the Dispersion had given it up long since because the Law
forbade any such sacrifice outside the Temple.[188:1] When Jerusalem was
destroyed Jewish sacrifice ceased altogether. The Christians seem from
the beginning to have generally followed the Jewish practice. But
sacrifice was in itself not likely to continue in a society of large
towns. It meant turning your temples into very ill-conducted
slaughter-houses, and was also associated with a great deal of muddled
and indiscriminate charity.[188:2] One might have hoped that men so
high-minded and spiritual as Julian and Sallustius would have considered
this practice unnecessary or even have reformed it away. But no. It was
part of the genuine Hellenic tradition; and no jot or tittle of that
tradition should, if they could help it, be allowed to die. Sacrifice is
desirable, argues Sallustius, because it is a gift of life. God has
given us life, as He has given us all else. We must therefore pay to Him
some emblematic tithe of life. Again, prayers in themselves are merely
words; but with sacrifice they are words plus life, Living Words.
Lastly, we are Life of a sort, and God is Life of an infinitely higher
sort. To approach Him we need always a medium or a mediator; the medium
between life and life must needs be life. We find that life in the
sacrificed animal.[189:1]
The argument shows what ingenuity these religious men had at their
command, and what trouble they would take to avoid having to face a fact
and reform a bad system.
There follows a long and rather difficult argument to show that the
world is, in itself, eternal. The former discussion on this point had
only shown that the gods would not destroy it. This shows that its own
nature is indestructible. The arguments are very inconclusive, though
clever, and one wonders why the author is at so much pains. Indeed, he
is so earnest that at the end of the chapter he finds it necessary to
apologize to the Kosmos in case his language should have been
indiscreet. The reason, I think, is that the Christians were still, as
in apostolic times, pinning their faith to the approaching end of the
world by fire.[190:1] They announced the end of the world as near, and
they rejoiced in the prospect of its destruction. History has shown more
than once what terrible results can be produced by such beliefs as these
in the minds of excitable and suffering populations, especially those of
eastern blood. It was widely believed that Christian fanatics had from
time to time actually tried to light fires which should consume the
accursed world and thus hasten the coming of the kingdom which should
bring such incalculable rewards to their own organization and plunge the
rest of mankind in everlasting torment. To any respectable Pagan such
action was an insane crime made worse by a diabolical motive. The
destruction of the world, therefore, seems to have become a subject of
profound irritation, if not actually of terror. At any rate the doctrine
lay at the very heart of the _perniciosa superstitio_, and Sallustius
uses his best dialectic against it.
The title of Chapter XVIII has a somewhat pathetic ring: 'Why are
_Atheïai_'--Atheisms or rejections of God--'permitted, and that God is
not injured thereby?' Θεὸς οὐ βλάπτεται. 'If over certain parts of the
world there have occurred (and will occur more hereafter) rejections of
the gods, a wise man need not be disturbed at that.' We have always
known that the human soul was prone to error. God's providence is there;
but we cannot expect all men at all times and places to enjoy it
equally. In the human body it is only the eye that sees the light, the
rest of the body is ignorant of the light. So are many parts of the
earth ignorant of God.
Very likely, also, this rejection of God is a punishment. Persons who in
a previous life have known the gods but disregarded them, are perhaps
now born, as it were, blind, unable to see God; persons who have
committed the blasphemy of worshipping their own kings as gods may
perhaps now be cast out from the knowledge of God.
Philosophy had always rejected the Man-God, especially in the form of
King-worship; but opposition to Christianity no doubt intensifies the
protest.
The last chapter is very short. 'Souls that have lived in virtue, being
otherwise blessed and especially separated from their irrational part
and purged of all body, are joined with the gods and sway the whole
world together with them.' So far triumphant faith: then the
after-thought of the brave man who means to live his best life even if
faith fail him. 'But even if none of these rewards came to them, still
Virtue itself and the Joy and Glory of Virtue, and the Life that is
subject to no grief and no master, would be enough to make blessed those
who have set themselves to live in Virtue and have succeeded.'
* * * * *
There the book ends. It ends upon that well-worn paradox which, from the
second book of the _Republic_ onwards, seems to have brought so much
comfort to the nobler spirits of the ancient world. Strange how we
moderns cannot rise to it! We seem simply to lack the intensity of moral
enthusiasm. When we speak of martyrs being happy on the rack; in the
first place we rarely believe it, and in the second we are usually
supposing that the rack will soon be over and that harps and golden
crowns will presently follow. The ancient moralist believed that the
good man was happy then and there, because the joy, being in his soul,
was not affected by the torture of his body.[192:1]
Not being able fully to feel this conviction, we naturally incline to
think it affected or unreal. But, taking the conditions of the ancient
world into account, we must admit that the men who uttered this belief
at least understood better than most of us what suffering was. Many of
them were slaves, many had been captives of war. They knew what they
were talking about. I think, on a careful study of M. Aurelius,
Epictetus, and some of these Neo-Platonic philosophers, that we shall be
forced to realize that these men could rise to much the same heights of
religious heroism as the Catholic saints of the Middle Age, and that
they often did so--if I may use such a phrase--on a purer and thinner
diet of sensuous emotion, with less wallowing in the dust and less
delirium.
Be that as it may, we have now seen in outline the kind of religion
which ancient Paganism had become at the time of its final reaction
against Christianity. It is a more or less intelligible whole, and
succeeds better than most religions in combining two great appeals. It
appeals to the philosopher and the thoughtful man as a fairly complete
and rational system of thought, which speculative and enlightened minds
in any age might believe without disgrace. I do not mean that it is
probably true; to me all these overpowering optimisms which, by means of
a few untested _a priori_ postulates, affect triumphantly to disprove
the most obvious facts of life, seem very soon to become meaningless. I
conceive it to be no comfort at all, to a man suffering agonies of
frostbite, to be told by science that cold is merely negative and does
not exist. So far as the statement is true it is irrelevant; so far as
it pretends to be relevant it is false. I only mean that a system like
that of Sallustius is, judged by any standard, high, civilized, and
enlightened.
At the same time this religion appeals to the ignorant and the
humble-minded. It takes from the pious villager no single object of
worship that has turned his thoughts heavenwards. It may explain and
purge; it never condemns or ridicules. In its own eyes that was its
great glory, in the eyes of history perhaps its most fatal weakness.
Christianity, apart from its positive doctrines, had inherited from
Judaism the noble courage of its disbeliefs.
To compare this Paganism in detail with its great rival would be, even
if I possessed the necessary learning, a laborious and unsatisfactory
task. But if a student with very imperfect knowledge may venture a
personal opinion on this obscure subject, it seems to me that we often
look at such problems from a wrong angle. Harnack somewhere, in
discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian
sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main determining cause in
each case was not their comparative reasonableness of doctrine or skill
in controversy--for they practically never converted one another--but
simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth-rate in the
respective populations. On somewhat similar lines it always appears to
me that, historically speaking, the character of Christianity in these
early centuries is to be sought not so much in the doctrines which it
professed, nearly all of which had their roots and their close parallels
in older Hellenistic or Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which
it rested. For my own part, when I try to understand Christianity as a
mass of doctrines, Gnostic, Trinitarian, Monophysite, Arian and the
rest, I get no further. When I try to realize it as a sort of
semi-secret society for mutual help with a mystical religious basis,
resting first on the proletariates of Antioch and the great commercial
and manufacturing towns of the Levant, then spreading by instinctive
sympathy to similar classes in Rome and the West, and rising in
influence, like certain other mystical cults, by the special appeal it
made to women, the various historical puzzles begin to fall into place.
Among other things this explains the strange subterranean power by which
the emperor Diocletian was baffled, and to which the pretender
Constantine had to capitulate; it explains its humanity, its intense
feeling of brotherhood within its own bounds, its incessant care for the
poor, and also its comparative indifference to the virtues which are
specially incumbent on a governing class, such as statesmanship,
moderation, truthfulness, active courage, learning, culture, and public
spirit. Of course, such indifference was only comparative. After the
time of Constantine the governing classes come into the fold, bringing
with them their normal qualities, and thereafter it is Paganism, not
Christianity, that must uphold the flag of a desperate fidelity in the
face of a hostile world--a task to which, naturally enough, Paganism was
not equal. But I never wished to pit the two systems against one
another. The battle is over, and it is poor work to jeer at the wounded
and the dead. If we read the literature of the time, especially some
records of the martyrs under Diocletian, we shall at first perhaps
imagine that, apart from some startling exceptions, the conquered party
were all vicious and hateful, the conquerors, all wise and saintly.
Then, looking a little deeper, we shall see that this great controversy
does not stand altogether by itself. As in other wars, each side had its
wise men and its foolish, its good men and its evil. Like other
conquerors these conquerors were often treacherous and brutal; like
other vanquished these vanquished have been tried at the bar of history
without benefit of counsel, have been condemned in their absence and
died with their lips sealed. The polemic literature of Christianity is
loud and triumphant, the books of the Pagans have been destroyed.
Only an ignorant man will pronounce a violent or bitter judgement here.
The minds that are now tender, timid, and reverent in their orthodoxy
would probably in the third or fourth century have sided with the old
gods; those of more daring and puritan temper with the Christians. The
historian will only try to have sympathy and understanding for both.
They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia,
Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arîus: every party has yielded up its
persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and
heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all
claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought
might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and
John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they
would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison
with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to
the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of
them. In the words of one who speaks with greater knowledge than mine,
'the most inward man in these four contemporaries is the same. It is the
Spirit of the Fourth Century.'[196:1]
* * * * *
'Dieselbe Seelenstimmung, derselbe Spiritualismus'; also the same
passionate asceticism. All through antiquity the fight against luxury
was a fiercer and stronger fight than comes into our modern experience.
There was not more objective luxury in any period of ancient history
than there is now; there was never anything like so much. But there does
seem to have been more subjective abandonment to physical pleasure and
concomitantly a stronger protest against it. From some time before the
Christian era it seems as if the subconscious instinct of humanity was
slowly rousing itself for a great revolt against the long intolerable
tyranny of the senses over the soul, and by the fourth century the
revolt threatened to become all-absorbing. The Emperor Julian was
probably as proud of his fireless cell and the crowding lice in his
beard and cassock as an average Egyptian monk. The ascetic movement
grew, as we all know, to be measureless and insane. It seemed to be
almost another form of lust, and to have the same affinities with
cruelty. But it has probably rendered priceless help to us who come
afterwards. The insane ages have often done service for the sane, the
harsh and suffering ages for the gentle and well-to-do.
_Sophrosynê_, however we try to translate it, temperance, gentleness,
the spirit that in any trouble thinks and is patient, that saves and not
destroys, is the right spirit. And it is to be feared that none of these
fourth-century leaders, neither the fierce bishops with their homilies
on Charity, nor Julian and Sallustius with their worship of Hellenism,
came very near to that classic ideal. To bring back that note of
Sophrosynê I will venture, before proceeding to the fourth-century Pagan
creed, to give some sentences from an earlier Pagan prayer. It is cited
by Stobaeus from a certain Eusebius, a late Ionic Platonist of whom
almost nothing is known, not even the date at which he lived.[197:1] But
the voice sounds like that of a stronger and more sober age.
'May I be no man's enemy,' it begins, 'and may I be the friend
of that which is eternal and abides. May I never quarrel with
those nearest to me; and if I do, may I be reconciled quickly.
May I never devise evil against any man; if any devise evil
against me, may I escape uninjured and without the need of
hurting him. May I love, seek, and attain only that which is
good. May I wish for all men's happiness and envy none. May I
never rejoice in the ill-fortune of one who has wronged
me. . . . When I have done or said what is wrong, may I never
wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until
I make amends. . . . May I win no victory that harms either me
or my opponent. . . . May I reconcile friends who are wroth
with one another. May I, to the extent of my power, give all
needful help to my friends and to all who are in want. May I
never fail a friend in danger. When visiting those in grief
may I be able by gentle and healing words to soften their
pain. . . . May I respect myself. . . . May I always keep tame
that which rages within me. . . . May I accustom myself to be
gentle, and never be angry with people because of
circumstances. May I never discuss who is wicked and what
wicked things he has done, but know good men and follow in
their footsteps.'
There is more of it. How unpretending it is and yet how searching! And
in the whole there is no petition for any material blessing, and--most
striking of all--it is addressed to no personal god. It is pure prayer.
Of course, to some it will feel thin and cold. Most men demand of their
religion more outward and personal help, more physical ecstasy, a more
heady atmosphere of illusion. No one man's attitude towards the
Uncharted can be quite the same as his neighbour's. In part
instinctively, in part superficially and self-consciously, each
generation of mankind reacts against the last. The grown man turns from
the lights that were thrust upon his eyes in childhood. The son shrugs
his shoulders at the watchwords that thrilled his father, and with
varying degrees of sensitiveness or dullness, of fuller or more
fragmentary experience, writes out for himself the manuscript of his
creed. Yet, even for the wildest or bravest rebel, that manuscript is
only a palimpsest. On the surface all is new writing, clean and
self-assertive. Underneath, dim but indelible in the very fibres of the
parchment, lie the characters of many ancient aspirations and raptures
and battles which his conscious mind has rejected or utterly forgotten.
And forgotten things, if there be real life in them, will sometimes
return out of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward groping of
humanity. A religious system like that of Eusebius or Marcus, or even
Sallustius, was not built up without much noble life and strenuous
thought and a steady passion for the knowledge of God. Things of that
make do not, as a rule, die for ever.
FOOTNOTES:
[177:1] _De Vit. Contempl._, p. 477 M.
[177:2] _Conf._ ix. 9.
[178:1] Gibbon, chap. xxi, notes 161, 162.
[178:2] _Rise of the Greek Epic_, chap. i.
[180:1] ἄδολος καὶ καθαρὰ παρρησία.
[181:1] 'Many of his sections come straight from Plotinus: xiv and xv
perhaps from Porphyry's _Letter to Marcella_, an invaluable document for
the religious side of Neo-Platonism. A few things (prayer to the souls
of the dead in iv, to the Cosmos in xvii, the doctrine of τύχη, in ix)
are definitely un-Plotinian: probably concessions to popular
religion.'--_E. R. D._
[188:1] S. Reinach, _Orpheus_, p. 273 (Engl. trans., p. 185).
[188:2] See Ammianus, xxii. 12, on the bad effect of Julian's
sacrifices. Sacrifice was finally forbidden by the emperor Theodosius in
391. It was condemned by Theophrastus, and is said by Porphyry (_De
Abstinentia_, ii. 11) simply λαβεῖν τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐξ ἀδικίας.
[189:1] Sallustius's view of sacrifice is curiously like the
illuminating theory of MM. Hubert and Mauss, in which they define
primitive sacrifice as a medium, a bridge or lightning-conductor,
between the profane and the sacred. 'Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction
du Sacrifice' (_Année Sociologique_, ii. 1897-8), since republished in
the _Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions_, 1909.
[190:1] Cf. Minucius Felix, _Octavius_, p. 96, Ouzel (chap. 11, Boenig).
'Quid quod toti orbi et ipsi mundo cum sideribus suis minantur
incendium, ruinam moliuntur?' The doctrine in their mouths became a very
different thing from the Stoic theory of the periodic re-absorption of
the universe in the Divine Element. Ibid., pp. 322 ff. (34 Boenig).
[192:1] Even Epicurus himself held κὰν στρεβλώθῃ ὁ σοφός, εἶναι αὐτὸν
εὐδαίμονα. Diog. La. x. 118. See above, end of chap. iii.
[196:1] Geffcken in the _Neue Jahrbücher_, xxi. 162 f.
[197:1] Mullach, _Fragmenta Philosophorum_, iii. 7, from Stob. _Flor._
i. 85.