The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire Part 2

[Sidenote: Isis and Serapis]

Isis seems to have appealed to women. Tibullus complains of Delia's devotion to her, and her ritual. There were baths and purifications; the worshippers wore linen garments and slept alone. Whole nights were spent sitting in the temple amid the rattling of the sistrum. Morning and evening the votary with flowing hair recited the praises of the G.o.ddess.[78] Isis could make her voice heard on occasion, or her snake of silver would be seen to move its head, and penance was required to avert her anger. She might bid her worshippers to stand in the Tiber in the winter, or to crawl, naked and trembling, with blood-stained knees, round the Campus Martius--the Iseum stood in the Campus as it was forbidden within the City Walls; or to fetch water from Egypt to sprinkle in the Roman shrine. They were high honours indeed that Anubis claimed, as, surrounded by shaven priests in linen garments, he scoured the city and laughed at the people who beat their b.r.e.a.s.t.s as he pa.s.sed.[79] The "barking" Anubis might be despised by Virgil and others, but the vulgar feared him as the attendant of Isis and Serapis.[80] Isis began to usurp the functions of Juno Lucina, and women in childbed called upon her to deliver them.[81] She gave oracles, which were familiar perhaps even so early as Ennius' day,[82]

and men and women slept in the temples of Isis and Serapis, as they did in those of aesculapius, to obtain in dreams the knowledge they needed to appease the G.o.d, or to {23} recover their health, or what not.[83]

It is not surprising that the shrines of Isis are mentioned by Ovid and Juvenal as the resorts of loose women.[84]

The devotion of the women is proved by the inscriptions which are found recording their offerings to Isis. One woman, a Spaniard, may be taken as an ill.u.s.tration. In honour of her daughter she dedicated a silver statue to Isis, and she set forth how the G.o.ddess wore a diadem composed of one big pearl, six little pearls, emeralds, rubies, and jacinths; earrings of emeralds and pearls; a necklace of thirty-six pearls and eighteen emeralds (with two for clasps); bracelets on her arms and legs; rings on her fingers; and emeralds on her sandals.[85]

There is evidence to show that the Madonna in Southern Italy is really Isis re-named. Isis, like the Madonna, was painted and sculptured with a child in her arms (Horus, Harpocrates). Their functions coincide as closely as this inscription proves that their offerings do.[86]

Die Mutter Gottes zu Kevlaar Tragt heut' ihr bestes Kleid.

At first, it is possible that Egyptian religion, as it spread all over the world, was little better than Phrygian, but it had a better future.

With Plutarch's work upon it we shall have to deal later on. Apuleius, at the end of the second century worshipped an Isis, who identified all the Divinities with herself and was approached through the most imposing sacraments. She was the power underlying all nature, but there was a spiritual side to her worship. Two centuries or so later, Julian "the Apostate" looks upon Serapis as Catholics have done upon St Peter--he is "the kindly and gentle G.o.d, who set souls utterly free from becoming or birth (_geneseos_) and does not, when once they are free, nail them down to other bodies in punishment, but conveys them upward and brings them into the {24} ideal world."[87] It is possible that some hint of this lurked in the religion from the first, and, if it did, we need not be surprised that it escaped Juvenal's notice.

It was not merely G.o.ds that came from the East, but a new series of religious ideas. Here were religions that claimed the whole of life, that taught of moral pollution and of reconciliation, that gave anew the old sacramental value to rituals,--religions of priest and devotee, equalizing rich and poor, save for the cost of holy rites, and giving to women the consciousness of life in touch with the divine. The eunuch priests of Cybele and the monks of Serapis introduced a new abstinence to Western thought. It is significant that Christian monasticism and the coen.o.bite life began in Egypt, where, as we learn from papyri found in recent years, great monasteries of Serapis existed long before our era. Side by side with celibacy came vegetarianism.

No polytheistic religion can exclude G.o.ds from its pantheon; all divinities that man can devise have a right there. Thus Cybele and Isis made peace with each other and with all the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses whom they met in their travels--and with all the _daemonia_ too. Their cults were steeped in superst.i.tion, and swung to and fro between continence and sensuality. They orientalized every religion of the West and developed every superst.i.tious and romantic tendency. In the long run, they brought Philosophy to its knees, abasing it to be the apologist of everything they taught and did, and dignifying themselves by giving a philosophic colouring to their mysticism. But this is no strange thing. A religion begins in magic with rites and symbols that belong to the crudest Nature-worship--to agriculture, for instance, and the reproductive organs--and gradually develops or absorbs higher ideas, till it may reach the unity of the G.o.dhead and the immortality of the soul; but the ultimate question is, will it cut itself clear of its past? And this the religions of Cybele and Isis never satisfactorily achieved.

In the meantime they promised little towards a moral regeneration of society. They offered men and women emotions, but they scarcely touched morality. To the terrors of life, already many enough, they added crowning fears, and cramped and dwarfed the minds of men.

{25}

[Sidenote: Lucretius]

"O hapless race of men!" cried Lucretius, "when they attributed such deeds to the G.o.ds and added cruel anger thereto! what groanings did they then beget for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children's children! No act of piety is it to be often seen with veiled head turning toward a stone, to haunt every altar, to lie prostrate on the ground with hands outspread before the shrines of G.o.ds, to sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts and link vow to vow--no! rather to be able to look on all things with a mind at peace."[88] And a mind at peace was the last thing that contemporary religion could offer to any one. "Human life," he says, "lay visibly before men's eyes foully crushed to earth under the weight of Religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon men," till Epicurus "dared first to uplift mortal eyes against her face and first to withstand her.... The living force of his soul gained the day; on he pa.s.sed far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traversed in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe.

And thence he returns again a conqueror, to tell us what can and what cannot come into being; in short on what principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep-set boundary mark. So Religion is put under our feet and trampled upon in its turn; while as for us, his victory sets us on a level with heaven."[89]

It was the establishment of law which brought peace to Lucretius. In the ease of mind which we see he gained from the contemplation of the fixity of cause and effect, in the enthusiasm with which he emphasizes such words as _rationes_, _faedera_, _leges_, with which he celebrates _Natura gubernans_, we can read the horrible weight upon a feeling soul of a world distracted by the incalculable caprices of a myriad of divine or daemonic beings.[90] The force with which he flings himself against the doctrine of a future life shows that it is a fight for freedom. If men would rid themselves of "the dread of something after death"--and they could if they would, for reason will do it--they could live in "the serene temples of the wise"; the G.o.ds would pa.s.s from their minds; bereavement would lose its sting, and life would no longer be brutalized by the cruelties of terror. Avarice, treachery, murder, civil war, suicide--all these things are the fruit of this fear of death.[91]

{26}

Religion, similarly, "often and often has given birth to sinful and unholy deeds." The ill.u.s.tration, which he uses, is the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and it seems a little remote. Yet Pliny says that in 97 B.C. in the consulship of Lentulus and Cra.s.sus, a decree of the Senate forbade human sacrifice--_ne h.o.m.o immolaretur_. "It cannot be estimated," he goes on, "what a debt is owed to the Romans who have done away (in Gaul and Britain) with monstrous rites, in which it was counted the height of religion to kill a man, and a most healthful thing to eat him."[92] Elsewhere he hints darkly at his own age having seen something of the kind, and there is an obscure allusion in Plutarch's life of Marcellus to "unspeakable rites, that none may see, which are performed (?) upon Greeks and Gauls."[93] "At the temple of Aricia," says Strabo, "there is a barbarian and Scythian practice. For there is there established a priest, a runaway slave, who has killed with his own hand his predecessor. There he is, then, ever sword in hand, peering round about, lest he should be attacked, ready to defend himself." Strabo's description of the temple on the lake and the precipice overhanging it adds to the impressiveness of the scene he thus pictures.[94] If human sacrifice was rare in practice, none the less it was in the minds of men.

_Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum_

concludes Lucretius, and yet it was not perhaps his last thought.

M. Patin has a fine study of the poet in which he deals with "the anti-Lucretius in Lucretius." Even in the matter of religion, his keen observation of Nature frequently suggests difficulties which are more powerfully expressed and more convincing than the arguments with which he himself tries to refute them. "When we look up to the heavenly regions of the great universe, the aether set on high above the glittering stars, and the {27} thought comes into our mind of the sun and moon and their courses; then indeed in hearts laden with other woes that doubt too begins to wake and raise its head--can it be perchance, after all, that we have to do with some vast Divine power that wheels those bright stars each in his...o...b..t? Again who is there whose mind does not shrink into itself with fear of the G.o.ds, whose limbs do not creep with terror, when the parched earth rocks under horrible blow of the thunderbolt, and the roar sweeps over the vast sky? ... When too the utmost fury of the wild wind scours the sea and sweeps over its waters the admiral with his stout legions and his elephants, does he not in prayer seek peace with the G.o.ds? ... but all in vain, since, full oft, caught in the whirlwind, he is driven, for all his prayers, on, on to the shoals of death. Thus does some hidden power trample on mankind.... Again, when the whole earth rocks under their feet, and towns fall at the shock or hang ready to collapse, what wonder if men despise themselves, and make over to the G.o.ds high prerogative and marvellous powers to govern all things?"[95]

That Lucretius should be so open to impressions of this kind, in spite of his philosophy, is ra measure of his greatness as a poet. It adds weight and worth to all that he says--to his hatred of the polytheism and superst.i.tion round about him, and to his judgment upon their effect in darkening and benumbing the minds of men. He understands the feelings which he dislikes--he has felt them. The spectacle of the unguessed power that tramples on mankind has moved him; and he has suffered the distress of all delicate spirits in times of bloodshed and disorder. He knows the effect of such times upon those who still worship. "Much more keenly in evil days do they turn their minds to religion."[96]

{28}

We have now to consider another poet, a disciple of Lucretius in his early years, who, under the influence of Nature and human experience, moved away from Epicureanism, and sought reconciliation with the G.o.ds, though he was too honest with himself to find peace in the systems and ideas that were yet available.

[Sidenote: Virgil]

Virgil was born in the year 70 B.C.--the son of a little self-made man in a village North of the Po. He grew up in the country, with a spirit that year by year grew more sensitive to every aspect of the world around him. No Roman poet had a more gentle and sympathetic love of Nature; none ever entered so deeply and so tenderly into the sorrows of men. He lived through forty years of Civil War, veiled and open. He saw its effects in broken homes and aching hearts, in coa.r.s.ened minds and reckless lives. He was driven from his own farm, and had, like aeneas, to rescue an aged and blind father. Under such experience his early Epicureanism dissolved--it had always been too genial to be the true kind. The Epicurean should never go beyond friendship, and Virgil loved. His love of the land in which he was born showed it to him more worthy to be loved than men had yet realized. Virgil was the pioneer who discovered the beauty, the charm and the romance of Italy. He loved the Italians and saw poetry in their hardy lives and quiet virtues, though they were not Greeks. His love of his father and of his land opened to him the significance of all love, and the deepening and widening of his experience is to be read in the music, stronger and profounder, that time reveals in his poetry.

Here was a poet who loved Rome more than ever did Augustus or Horace, and he had no such speedy cure as they for "the woes of sorrowful Hesperia." The loss of faith in the old G.o.ds meant more to him than to them, so his tone in speaking of them is quieter, a great deal, than that of Horace. He took the decline of morals more seriously and more inwardly, and he saw more deeply into the springs of action; he could never lightly use the talk of rapid and sweeping reformation, as his friend did in the odes which the Emperor inspired. He had every belief in Augustus, who was dearer to him personally than to Horace, and he hoped for much outcome from the new movement in the State. But with all his absorbing interest in {29} his own times--and how deep that interest was, only long and minute study of his poems will reveal--he was without scheme or policy. He came before his countrymen, as prophets and poets do in all ages--a child in affairs, but a man in inward experience; he had little or nothing to offer but the impressions left upon his soul by human life. He had the advantage over most prophets in being a "lord of language"; he drew more music from Latin words than had ever been achieved before or was ever reached again.

He told men of a new experience of Nature. It is hardly exaggeration to say that he stands nearer Wordsworth in this feeling than any other poet. He had the same "impulses of deeper birth"; he had seen new gleams and heard new voices; he had enjoyed what no Italian had before, and he spoke in a new way, unintelligible then, and unintelligible still, to those who have not seen and heard the same things. The gist of it all he tried to give in the language of Pantheism, which the Stoics had borrowed from Pythagoras:--"The Deity, they tell us, pervades all, earth and the expanse of sea, and the deep vault of heaven; from Him flocks, herds, men, wild beasts of every sort, each creature at its birth draws the bright thread of life; further, to Him all things return, are restored and reduced--death has no place among them; but they fly up alive into the ranks of the stars and take their seats aloft in the sky." So John Conington did the pa.s.sage into English. But in such cases it may be said with no disrespect to the commentator who has done so much for his poet, the original words stand to the translation, as Virgil's thought did to the same thought in a Stoic's brain.

_Deum namque ire per omnis Terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum; Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum, Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas; Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri Omnia, nec morti esse loc.u.m, sed viva volare Sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo_.

(Georgics, iv, 221.)

The words might represent a fancy, or a dogma of the schools and many no doubt so read them, because they had no {30} experience to help them. But to others it is clear that the pa.s.sage is one of the deepest import, for it is the key to Virgil's mind and the thought is an expression of what we can call by no other name than religion. Around him men and women were seeking communion with G.o.ds; he had had communion with what he could not name--he had experienced religion in a very deep, abiding and true way. There is nothing for it--at least for Englishmen--but to quote the "lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"--

I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Virgil's experience did not stop here; like Wordsworth, he found

Nature's self By all varieties of human love a.s.sisted.

He had been a son and a brother; and such relations of men to men impressed him--they took him into the deepest and most beautiful regions of life; and one of the charms of Italy was that it was written all over with the records of human love and helpfulness. The clearing, the orchard, the hilltop town, the bed of flowers, all spoke to him "words that could not be uttered." His long acquaintance with such scripts brought it about that he found

in man an object of delight, Of pure imagination and of love--

and he came to the Roman people with a deep impression of human worth--something unknown altogether in Roman poetry before or after.

Lucretius was impressed with man's insignificance in the universe; Horace, with man's folly. Virgil's {31} poetry throbbed with the sense of man's grandeur and his sanct.i.ty.

This human greatness, which his poetry brought home to the sympathetic reader, was not altogether foreign to the thought of the day. _h.o.m.o sacra res homini_[97] was the teaching of the Stoics, but man was a more sacred thing to the poet than to the philosopher, for what the philosopher conceived to be a flaw and a weakness in man, the poet found to be man's chief significance. The Stoic loudly proclaimed man to be a member of the universe. The poet found man knit to man by a myriad ties, the strength of which he realized through that pain against which the Stoic sought to safeguard him. Man revealed to the poet his inner greatness in the haunting sense of his limitations--he could not be self-sufficient (_autarkes_) as the Stoic urged; he depended on men, on women and children, on the beauty of gra.s.s and living creature, of the sea and sky. And even all these things could not satisfy his craving for love and fellowship; he felt a "hunger for the infinite." Here perhaps is the greatest contribution of Virgil to the life of the age.

He, the poet to whom man and the world were most various and meant most, came to his people, and, without any articulate expression of it in direct words, made it clear to them that he had felt a gap in the heart of things, which philosophy could never fill. Philosophy could remove this sense of incompleteness, but only at the cost of love; and love was to Virgil, as his poetry shows, the very essence of life. Yet he gave, and not altogether unconsciously, the impression that in proportion as love is apprehended, its demands extend beyond the present. The sixth book of the _aeneid_ settles nothing and proves nothing, but it expresses an instinct, strong in Virgil, as the result of experience, that love must reach beyond the grave. Further, the whole story of aeneas is an utterance of man's craving for G.o.d, of the sense of man's incompleteness without a divine complement. These are the records of Virgil's life, intensely individual, but not peculiar to himself. In the literature of his century, there is little indication of such instincts, but the history of four hundred years shows that they were deep in the general heart of man.

These impressions Virgil brought before the Roman world. {32} As such things are, they were a criticism, and they meant a change of values.

In the light of them, the restoration of religion by Augustus became a little thing; the popular superst.i.tion of the day was stamped as vulgar and trivial in itself, while it became the sign of deep and unsatisfied craving in the human heart; and lastly the current philosophies, in the face of Virgil's poetry, were felt to be shallow and cold, talk of the lip and trick of the brain. Of course this is not just to the philosophers who did much for the world, and without whom Virgil would not have been what he was. None the less, it was written in Virgil's poetry that the religions and philosophies of mankind must be thought over anew.

This is no light contribution to an age or to mankind. In this case it carries with it the whole story that lies before us. Such an expression of a common instinct gave new force to that instinct; it added a powerful impulse to the deepest pa.s.sion that man knows; and, in spite of the uncertainties which beset the poet himself, it gave new hope to mankind that the cry of the human heart for G.o.d was one that should receive an answer.

Chapter I Footnotes:

[1] Cic. _ad fam._ x, 16, 2, _Ipse tibi sis senatus_.

[2] _Georgic_ i, 505-514 (Conington's translation, with alterations).

[3] Polybius, vi, 56, Shuckburgh's Translation.

[4] Polybius, xviii, 35.

[5] s.e.xtus Empiricus, _Adv. mathematicos_, ix, 54.

[6] Cicero, _N.D._ i, 42, 118.

[7] Diodorus Siculus, i, 2.