Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 14

_L'atheisme, voila l'ennemi._

This may surprise us at first sight, but the explanation is easy. To Julian the one great truth that matters is the presence and glory of the G.o.ds. No doubt, they are all ultimately one: they are d???e??, 'forces,' not persons, but for reasons above our comprehension they are manifest only under conditions of form, time, and personality, and have so been revealed and worshipped and partly known by the great minds of the past. In Julian's mind the religious emotion itself becomes the thing to live for. Every object that has been touched by that emotion is thereby glorified and made sacred. Every shrine where men have worshipped in truth of heart is thereby a house of G.o.d. The worship may be mixed up with all sorts of folly, all sorts of unedifying practice.

Such things must be purged away, or, still better, must be properly understood. For to the pure all things are pure: and the myths that shock the vulgar are n.o.ble allegories to the wise and reverent. Purge religion from dross, if you like; but remember that you do so at your peril. One false step, one self-confident rejection of a thing which is merely too high for you to grasp, and you are darkening the Sun, casting G.o.d out of the world. And that was just what the Christians deliberately did. In many of the early Christian writings denial is a much greater element than a.s.sertion. The beautiful _Octavius_ of Minucius Felix (about A. D. 130-60) is an example. Such denial was, of course, to our judgement, eminently needed, and rendered a great service to the world.

But to Julian it seemed impiety. In other Christian writings the misrepresentation of pagan rites and beliefs is decidedly foul-mouthed and malicious. Quite apart from his personal wrongs and his contempt for the character of Constantius, Julian could have no sympathy for men who overturned altars and heaped blasphemy on old deserted shrines, defilers of every sacred object that was not protected by popularity. The most that such people could expect from him was that they should not be proscribed by law.

But meantime what were the mult.i.tudes of the G.o.d-fearing to believe? The arm of the state was not very strong or effective. Labour as he might to supply good teaching to all provincial towns, Julian could not hope to educate the poor and ignorant to understand Plato and M. Aurelius. For them, he seems to say, all that is necessary is that they should be pious and G.o.d-fearing in their own way. But for more or less educated people, not blankly ignorant, and yet not professed students of philosophy, there might be some simple and authoritative treatise issued--a sort of reasoned creed, to lay down in a convincing manner the outlines of the old h.e.l.lenic religion, before the Christians and Atheists should have swept all fear of the G.o.ds from off the earth.

The treatise is this work of Sall.u.s.tius.

The Christian fathers from Minucius Felix onward have shown us what was the most vulnerable point of Paganism: the traditional mythology.

Sall.u.s.tius deals with it at once. The _Akroates_, or pupil, he says in Section 1, needs some preliminary training. He should have been well brought up, should not be incurably stupid, and should not have been familiarized with foolish fables. Evidently the mythology was not to be taught to children. He enunciates certain postulates of religious thought, viz. that G.o.d is always good and not subject to pa.s.sion or to change, and then proceeds straight to the traditional myths. In the first place, he insists that they are what he calls 'divine'. That is, they are inspired or have some touch of divine truth in them. This is proved by the fact that they have been uttered, and sometimes invented, by the most inspired poets and philosophers and by the G.o.ds themselves in oracles--a very characteristic argument.

The myths are all expressions of G.o.d and of the goodness of G.o.d; but they follow the usual method of divine revelation, to wit, mystery and allegory. The myths state clearly the one tremendous fact that the G.o.ds _are_; that is what Julian cared about and the Christians denied: _what_ they are the myths reveal only to those who have understanding. 'The world itself is a great myth, in which bodies and inanimate things are visible, souls and minds invisible.'

'But, admitting all this, how comes it that the myths are so often absurd and even immoral?' For the usual purpose of mystery and allegory; in order to make people think. The soul that wishes to know G.o.d must make its own effort; it cannot expect simply to lie still and be told.

The myths by their obvious falsity and absurdity on the surface stimulate the mind capable of religion to probe deeper.

He proceeds to give instances, and chooses at once myths that had been 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 G.o.ds. 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. Sall.u.s.tius'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 G.o.d.

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 Sall.u.s.tius 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, Sall.u.s.tius ends with the prayer: 'When I say these things concerning the myths, may the G.o.ds 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 t? ??a???, the Good.

The G.o.ds are emanations or forces issuing from the Good; the makers of this world are secondary G.o.ds; 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, men, and spirits, of religious inst.i.tutions 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. Sall.u.s.tius 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 G.o.ds. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and has existed as long as that goodness has existed.

Next come some simpler questions about man's relation to the G.o.ds. In what sense do we say that the G.o.ds are angry with the wicked or are appeased by repentance? Sall.u.s.tius is quite firm. The G.o.ds cannot ever be glad--for that which is glad is also sorry; cannot be angry--for anger is a pa.s.sion; and obviously they cannot be appeased by gifts or prayers. Even men, if they are honest, require higher motives than that.

G.o.d is unchangeable, always good, always doing good. If we are good, we are nearer to the G.o.ds, 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 G.o.d from shining into us.

If we repent, again, we do not make any change in G.o.d; we only, by the conversion of our soul towards the divine, heal our own badness and enjoy again the goodness of the G.o.ds. To say that the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, when the G.o.ds need nothing and can have nothing added to them? We do so in order to have more communion with the G.o.ds. 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 a.s.sociated 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 Sall.u.s.tius would have considered this practice unnecessary or even have reformed it away. But no. It was part of the genuine h.e.l.lenic tradition; and no jot or t.i.ttle of that tradition should, if they could help it, be allowed to die. Sacrifice is desirable, argues Sall.u.s.tius, because it is a gift of life. G.o.d has given us life, as He has given us all else. We must therefore pay to Him some emblematic t.i.the 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds 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 superst.i.tio_, and Sall.u.s.tius uses his best dialectic against it.

The t.i.tle of Chapter XVIII has a somewhat pathetic ring: 'Why are _Atheai_'--Atheisms or rejections of G.o.d--'permitted, and that G.o.d is not injured thereby?' Te?? ?? ??pteta?. 'If over certain parts of the world there have occurred (and will occur more hereafter) rejections of the G.o.ds, a wise man need not be disturbed at that.' We have always known that the human soul was p.r.o.ne to error. G.o.d'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 G.o.d.

Very likely, also, this rejection of G.o.d is a punishment. Persons who in a previous life have known the G.o.ds but disregarded them, are perhaps now born, as it were, blind, unable to see G.o.d; persons who have committed the blasphemy of worshipping their own kings as G.o.ds may perhaps now be cast out from the knowledge of G.o.d.

Philosophy had always rejected the Man-G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds 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 n.o.bler 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 Sall.u.s.tius 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 n.o.ble 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 h.e.l.lenistic or Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which it rested. For my own part, when I try to understand Christianity as a ma.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 inc.u.mbent on a governing cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 G.o.ds; 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 Arius: 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 Sall.u.s.tius, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 ca.s.sock 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 l.u.s.t, 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.

_Sophrosyne_, 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 Sall.u.s.tius with their worship of h.e.l.lenism, came very near to that cla.s.sic ideal. To bring back that note of Sophrosyne 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pet.i.tion for any material blessing, and--most striking of all--it is addressed to no personal G.o.d. 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 att.i.tude 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 ma.n.u.script of his creed. Yet, even for the wildest or bravest rebel, that ma.n.u.script is only a palimpsest. On the surface all is new writing, clean and self-a.s.sertive. 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 Sall.u.s.tius, was not built up without much n.o.ble life and strenuous thought and a steady pa.s.sion for the knowledge of G.o.d. 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.