The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 39

_Sacramentum_ in Roman public law meant (1) a legal formula (_legis actio_), under which a sum of money was deposited, originally in a temple,[983] to be forfeited by the loser in a suit. The deposition _in loco sacro_ gives the word to the process, and helps us to see that it must mean some act which has a religious sanction. So with (2) its other meaning, _i.e._ the oath of obedience taken by the soldier, who was _iuratus in verba_, that is, sworn under a formula with a religious sanction attached.[984] It is tempting to suppose that it is through this channel that it found its way into the Christian vocabulary--the soldier of Christ affirming his allegiance in the solemn rites of baptism, marriage, or the Eucharist. It is a curious fact that it seems to be used in this way in the religion of Mithras,[985] which was especially powerful among the Roman legions of the Empire, and in which there was a grade of the faithful with the t.i.tle of _milites_.

_Sacramentum_ was here the word for the initiatory rites of a grade. In the earliest Christian writers of Latin it usually means a mystery; thus Arn.o.bius writes of the Christian religion as revealing the "veritatis absconditae sacramenta";[986] but in another pa.s.sage the idea in his mind seems to be that of military service. It is better, he says, for Christians to break their worldly contracts, even of marriage, than to break the _fides Christiana_, "_et salutaris militiae sacramenta deponere_;"[987] and Tertullian more than once attaches the same military meaning to it: "Vocati sumus ad militiam Dei vivi iam tunc _c.u.m in verba sacramenti spopondimus_."[988] Perhaps we may take it that the word, though of general significance for a religiously binding force produced by certain mysterious rites, had a special attraction for writers of the painful third century A.D., as reflecting into the Christian life from old Roman times something of the spirit of the duty and self-sacrifice of the loyal legionary. In any case we have once more a verbal legacy of priceless value.[989]

To sum up what I have been saying, there were certain ingredients in the Roman soil, deposits of the Roman religious experience, which were in their several ways favourable to the growth of a new plant. There were also certain direct legacies from the old Roman religion, of which Christianity could dispose with profit, in the shape of forms of ritual, and, what was even of greater value, words of real significance in the old religion, which were destined to become of permanent and priceless value in the Christian speech of the western nations. There were also other points in the society and organisation of the Roman Empire which were of great importance for the growth of the new creed; but these lie outside my proper subject, and have been dealt with by Professor Gardner in the lecture to which I alluded at the beginning of this lecture, and most instructively by Sir W. M. Ramsay in more than one of his books, and especially in _St. Paul, the Traveller and Roman Citizen_.

And yet, all this taken together, so far from explaining Christianity, does not help us much in getting to understand even the conditions under which it grew into men's minds as a new power in the life of the world.

The plant, though grown in soil which had borne other crops, was wholly new in structure and vital principle. I say this deliberately, after spending so many years on the study of the religion of the Romans, and making myself acquainted in some measure with the religions of other peoples. The essential difference, as it appears to me as a student of the history of religion, is this, that whereas the connection between religion and morality has so far been a loose one,--at Rome, indeed, so loose, that many have refused to believe in its existence,--the _new religion was itself morality_,[990] but morality consecrated and raised to a higher power than it had ever yet reached. It becomes active instead of pa.s.sive; mere good nature is replaced by a doctrine of universal love; _pietas_, the sense of duty in outward things, becomes an enthusiasm embracing all humanity, consecrated by such an appeal to the conscience as there never had been in the world before--the appeal to the life and death of the divine Master.

This is what is meant, if I am not mistaken, by the great contrast so often and so vividly drawn by St. Paul between the spirit and the flesh, between the children of light and the children of darkness, between the sleep or the death of the world and the waking to life in Christ, between the blameless and the harmless sons of G.o.d and the crooked and perverse generation among whom they shine as lights in the world. I confess that I never realised this contrast fully or intelligently until I read through the Pauline Epistles from beginning to end with a special historical object in view. It is useful to be familiar with the life and literature of the two preceding centuries, if only to be able the better to realise, in pa.s.sing to St. Paul, a Roman citizen, a man of education and experience, the great gulf fixed between the old and the new as he himself saw it.

But historical knowledge, knowledge of the Roman society of the day, study of the Roman religious experience, cannot do more than give us a little help; they cannot reveal the secret. History can explain the progress of morality, but it cannot explain its consecration. With St.

Paul the contrast is not merely one of good and bad, but of the spirit and the flesh, of life and death. No mere contemplation of the world around him could have kindled the fervency of spirit with which this contrast is by him conceived and expressed. Absolute devotion to the life and death of the Master, apart even from His work and teaching (of which, indeed, St. Paul says little), this alone can explain it. The love of Christ is the entirely new power that has come into the world;[991] not merely as a new type of morality, but as "_a Divine influence transfiguring human nature in a universal love_." The pa.s.sion of St. Paul's appeal lies in the consecration of every detail of it by reference to the life and death of his Master; and the great contrast is for him not as with the Stoics, between the universal law of Nature and those who rebel against it; not as with Lucretius, between the blind victims of _religio_ and the indefatigable student of the _rerum natura_; not, as in the _Aeneid_, between the man who bows to the decrees of fate, destiny, G.o.d, or whatever we choose to call it, and the wilful rebel, victim of his own pa.s.sions; not, as in the Roman State and family, between the man who performs religious duties and the man who wilfully neglects them--between _pius_ and _impius_; but between the universal law of love, focussed and concentrated in the love of Christ, and the sleep, the darkness, the death of a world that will not recognise it.

I will conclude these lectures with one practical ill.u.s.tration of this great contrast, which will carry us back for a moment to the ritual of the old Roman _ius divinum_. That ritual, we saw, consisted mainly of sacrifice and prayer, the two apparently inseparable from each other. I pointed out that though the efficacy of the whole process was believed to depend on the strictest adherence to prescribed forms, whether of actions or words, the prayers, when we first meet with them, have got beyond the region of charm or spell, and are cast in the language of pet.i.tion; they show clearly a sense of the dependence of man on the Power manifesting itself in the universe. There was here, perhaps, a germ of religious development; but it was arrested in its growth by the formalisation of the whole Roman religious system, and no subst.i.tute was to be found for it either in the imported Greek ritual, or in the more enlightening doctrines of exotic Greek philosophy. The prayers used in the ritual of Augustus' great festival, which was almost as much Greek as Roman in character, seem to us as hard and formal as the most ancient Roman prayers that have come down to us. In the most emotional moments of the life of a Roman of enlightenment like Cicero, when we can truly say of him that he was touched by true religious feeling, as well as by the spiritual aspirations of the n.o.bler Greek philosophers, prayers find no place at all.

But for St. Paul and the members of the early Christian brotherhood the whole of life was a continuous worship, and the one great feature of that worship was prayer. It has been said by a great Christian writer of recent times that "when the attention of a thinking heathen was directed to the new religion spreading in the Roman Empire, the first thing to strike him as extraordinary would be that a religion of prayer was superseding the religion of ceremonies and invocation of G.o.ds; that it encouraged all, even the most uneducated, to pray, or, in other words, to meditate and exercise the mind in self-scrutiny and contemplation of G.o.d."[992] And, as the same writer says, prayer thus became a motive power of moral renewal and _inward civilisation_, to which nothing else could be compared for efficacy. And more than this, it was the chief inward and spiritual means of maintaining that universal law of love, which, so far as this life was concerned, was the great secret of the new religion.

NOTES TO LECTURE XX

[956] P. Gardner, _The Growth of Christianity_, 1907, p.

2. Cp. some remarks of Prof. Conway in _Virgil's Messianic Eclogue_, p. 39 foll.

[957] The phrase "enthusiasm of humanity" is, of course, that of the author of _Ecce h.o.m.o_, a most inspiring book for all students of religious history, as indeed for all other readers.

[958] Dobschutz on "Early Christian Eschatology," in _Transactions of the Third Congress for the History of Religions_, vol. ii. (Oxford, 1908), p. 320.

[959] The words are those of Mr. Glover in the last page of his _Studies in Virgil_.

[960] It should be understood that these legacies, with the exception of the last (the vocabulary), were only taken up by the Church after the first two centuries of its existence. And even the vocabulary of the early Roman Church was mainly Greek (Gwatkin, _Early Church History_, ii. 213), and it was not till the rise of the African school of writers (Tertullian, Arn.o.bius, Augustine) that the Latin vocabulary really established itself. Any real a.s.similation of Christian and pagan forms of worship was not possible until the latter were growing meaningless; then "the a.s.similation of Christianity to heathenism from the third century is matter of history" (Gwatkin, i. 269).

[961] Caird, _Gifford Lectures_, vol. ii. p. 353, has some interesting remarks on this point.

[962] See above, p. 211.

[963] _Growth of Christianity_, p. 144.

[964] See _Roman Festivals_, p. 308.

[965] _Confessions_, i. 14.

[966] Westcott, _Religious Thought in the West_, p. 246.

Gwatkin writes (vol. ii. 236) that all Augustine's conceptions are shaped by law and Stoicism. Cp. p. 237.

So, too, of Tertullian.

[967] By W. Otto, in the _Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft_, vol. xii. (1909) p. 533 foll.

[968] _De Inventione_, ii. 161.

[969] _De Legibus_, ii. 10. 25.

[970] _Ib._ 10. 23.

[971] Lucretius i. 101.

[972] _E.g._ Octavius 38. 2; and again at the end of that chapter.

[973] Lactantius, bk. v. (_de Iust.i.tia_) ch. 19. I may note here that the paragraph in the text where this is quoted was first published in the _Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions_ (Oxford, 1908), vol. ii. p. 174. I may also add that the restricted sense of the word _religio_ as meaning the monastic life is, of course, comparatively late. This restrictive use of heathen words, from the third century onwards, is the subject of some valuable remarks by Prof. Gwatkin in his _Early Church History_, vol. i. p. 268 foll.

[974] See _Roman Festivals_, p. 299, and the references there given.

[975] Livy i. 32, ix. 8. 6; Wissowa, _R.K._ p. 476; Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 56.

[976] Lactantius iv. 3 (_de vera sapientia_).

[977] _Ib._ v. (_de Iust.i.tia_) ch. 10.

[978] _Aen._ xi. 81.

[979] Marquardt, 145, note 5.

[980] _Aen._ xii. 648.

[981] Servius, _ad Aen._ xii. 648.

[982] The original meaning of _sanctus_ as applied to things, _e.g._ walls and tombs, was probably "inviolable"; Nettleship, _Contributions to Latin Lexicography_, _s.v._ "sanctus," who also suggests a connection between the word and the att.i.tude of the Roman towards his dead: thus Cicero in _Topica 90_ writes of _aequitas_ as consisting of three parts,--_pietas_, _sanct.i.tas_, and _iust.i.tia_,--meaning man's relation to the G.o.ds, the Manes, and his fellow-men. Nettleship also quotes _Aen._ v. 80 (_salve sancte parens_), Tibull. ii. 2. 6, and other pa.s.sages, which show that the word was specially used of the dead and their belongings. But when used of persons living, as frequently in the last century B.C., it expresses a certain purity of life, not without a religious tincture, which could not so well be expressed by any other word, owing to the original meaning being that of religious inviolability. Thus Cicero uses it in the 9th Philippic of his old friend Sulpicius, one of the best and purest men of his time; and long before Cicero, Cato had used it of an obligation at once ethical and religious: "Maiores _sanctius_ habuere defendi pupillos quam clientem non fallere." It is interesting to notice that it was used later on of Mithras and other oriental deities (c.u.mont, _Mon. myst. Mithra_, i. p. 533; _Les Religions orientales_, p. 289, note 45); in the case of Mithras, at least, this meant that his life was pure, and that he wished his worshippers to be pure also.

[983] Marquardt, p. 318, note 4; Mommsen, _Strafrecht_, pp. 902, 1026. See also Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, p. 56; Festus, p. 347.

[984] Greenidge, _op. cit._ p. 154.

[985] c.u.mont, _Mysterien von Mithras_, p. 116 of the German edition. See also De Marchi, _La Religione nella vita privata_, vol. ii. 114. It may be worth noting that the idea of life as the service of a soldier bound to obedience by his oath is found also in Stoicism; see Epictetus (_Arrian_), _Discourses_, i. 14, iii. 24, 99-101, ii. 26, 28-30; (Crossley's _Golden Sayings of Epictetus_, Nos. 37, 125, 132, 134).

[986] Arn.o.bius, _adv. Nationes_, i. 3.

[987] _Ib._ ii. 6.

[988] Tertull., _ad Martyr._ c. 3. Cp. _de Corona Militiae_, c. 11.

[989] It is curious that the word _sacerdos_ did not find its way into the Christian vocabulary. Apparently it had its chance; for Tertullian uses it in several ways, _e.g._, "summus sacerdos" for a bishop (_de Bapt._ 17; "disciplina sacerdotalis," _de Monog._ 7. 12; and for other examples see Harnack, _Entstehung und Entwickelung der Kirchenverfa.s.sung und des Kirchenrechts in den zwei ersten Jahrhunderten_, 1910, p. 85). But the words finally adopted for the grades of the priesthood were Greek: bishop, priest, and deacon. Nevertheless, the general word for the priesthood, as distinguished from the laity, is Latin (_ordo_); hence "ordination"

and holy "orders." It is not of religious origin, but taken from the language of munic.i.p.al life, _ordo et plebs_ being contrasted just as they were contrasted in _municipia_ as senate (_decuriones_) and all non-official persons. See Harnack, _op. cit._ p. 82.

[990] This is, of course, in one light, the legitimate development of the union of religion and morality in the Hebrew mind. "For the Israelite morality, righteousness, is simply doing the will of G.o.d, which from the earliest age is a.s.sumed to be ascertainable, and indeed ascertained. The Law in its simplest form was at once the rule of morality and the revealed will of G.o.d." "The central feature of O.T. morality is its religious character" (Alexander, _Ethics of St. Paul_, p. 34). In the religious system we have been occupied with, religion can only be reckoned as one of the factors in the growth of morality; it supplied the sanction for some acts of righteousness, but (in historical times at least) by no means for all.

Prof. Gwatkin, in his _Early Church History_, vol. i. p.

54, states the relation of early Christianity to morality thus: "Christ's person, not His teaching, is the message of the Gospel. If we know anything for certain about Jesus of Nazareth, it is that He steadily claimed to be the Son of G.o.d, the Redeemer of mankind, and the ruler of the world to come, and by that claim the Gospel stands or falls. Therefore, the Lord's disciples went not forth as preachers of morality, but as witnesses of his life, and of the historic resurrection which proved his mightiest claims. Their morality is always an inference from these, never the forefront of their teaching. They seem to think that if they can only fill men with true thankfulness for the gift of life in Christ, morality will take care of itself." I cannot but think that this is expressed too strongly, or baldly; but it is in the main in keeping with the impression left on my mind by a study of St.

Paul. It must, however, be remembered that the Pauline spirit is not exactly that of early Christianity in general: see Gwatkin, vol. i. p. 98. In the _Didache_, _e.g._, there is no trace of St. Paul's influence (104).

[991] In a book which had just been published when I was delivering these lectures at Edinburgh (_The Ethics of St. Paul_, by Archibald Alexander), I found a very interesting chapter on "The Dynamic of the New Life," p.

126 foll. The word which for the author best expresses that dynamic is _faith_, which is "the spring of all endeavour, the inspiration of all heroism" (p. 150). "It brings the whole life into the domain of spiritual freedom, and is the animating and energising principle of all moral purpose." What exactly is here understood by faith is explained on p. 151 to the end of the chapter, of which I may quote the concluding words: "Faith in Christ means life in Christ. And this complete yielding of self and vital union with the Saviour, this dying and rising again, is at once man's supreme ideal and the source of all moral greatness."