Five Stages of Greek Religion Part 13

[155:1] Lysander too had altars raised to him by some Asiatic cities.

[156:1] Dittenberger, _Inscr. Orientis Graeci_, 90; Wendland, _h.e.l.lenistisch-romische Kultur_, 1907, p. 74 f. and notes.

[157:1] Several of the phrases are interesting. The last gift of the heavenly G.o.ds to this Theos is the old gift of Mana. In Hesiod it was ???t?? te ??? te, the two ministers who are never away from the King Zeus. In Aeschylus it was Kratos and Bia who subdue Prometheus. In Tyrtaeus it was ???? ?a? ???t??. In other inscriptions of the Ptolemaic age it is S?t???a ?a? ???? or S?t???a ?a? ???? a??????. In the current Christian liturgies it is 'the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory'. _R.

G. E._{3}, p. 135, n. The new conception, as always, is rooted in the old. 'The G.o.ds Saviours, Brethren', &c., are of course Ptolemy Soter, Ptolemy Philadelphus, &c., and their Queens. The phrases e???? ??sa t??

????, ???? t?? ?????, ??ap????? ?p? t?? F??, are characteristic of the religious language of this period. Cf. also Col. i. 14, e???? t?? ?e??

t?? ????t??; 2 Cor. iv. 4; Ephes. i. 5, 6.

[158:1] Fr. 1118. Arnim. Cf. Antipater, fr. 33, 34, t? e?p???t???? is part of the definition of Deity.

[158:2] Plin., _Nat. Hist._ ii. 7, 18. Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem et haec ad aeternam gloriam via. Cf. also the striking pa.s.sages from Cicero and others in Wendland, p. 85, n. 2.

[159:1] The Stoic philosopher, teaching at Rhodes, _c._ 100 B. C. A man of immense knowledge and strong religious emotions, he moved the Stoa in the direction of Oriental mysticism. See Schwartz's sketch in _Characterkopfe_{a}, pp. 89-98. Also Norden's _Commentary on Aeneid_ vi.

[160:1] Jacoby in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_, vi. 954. It was called ?e?? ??a??af?.

[161:1] Cf. Plotin. _Enn._ I, ii. 6 ???' ? sp??d? ??? ??? ?a?t?a?

e??a?, ???? ?e?? e??a?.

[161:2] Acts xiv. 12. They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, because he was ? ????e??? t?? ?????.--Paul also writes to the Galatians (iv.

14): 'Ye received me _as a messenger of G.o.d, as Jesus Christ_.'

[162:1] Bousset, p. 238.

[162:2] Hippolytus, 134, 90 ff., text in Reitzenstein's _Poimandres_, pp. 83-98.

[163:1] _Republic_, 362 A. ??as???d??e?? is said to = ??as????p???, which is used both for 'impale' and 'crucify'. The two were alternative forms of the most slavish and cruel capital punishment, impalement being mainly Persian, crucifixion Roman.

[164:1] See _The Hymn of the Soul_, attributed to the Gnostic Bardesanes, edited by A. A. Bevan, Cambridge, 1897.

[164:2] Bousset cites Acta Archelai 8, and Epiphanius, _Haeres_. 66, 32.

[164:3] Gal. iv. 9; 1 Cor. xv. 21 f., 47; Rom. v. 12-18.

[165:1] ? ???stas?? t?? ?e????. Cf. Acts xvii. 32.

[165:2] Cleanthes, 538, Arnim; Diels, p. 592, 30. Cf. Philolaus, Diels, p. 336 f.

[166:1] See especially the interpretation of Nestor's Cup, Athenaeus, pp. 489 c. ff.

[167:1] I may refer to the learned and interesting remarks on the Esoteric Style in Prof. Margoliouth's edition of Aristotle's _Poetics_.

It is not, of course, the same as Allegory.

[169:1] Published in the Teubner series by William, 1907.

[170:1]

?f??? ? ?e??. ??a?s??t?? ? ???at??.

?? ??a??? e??t?t??. ?? de???? e?e??a?t???t??.

I regret to say that I cannot track this Epicurean 'tetractys' to its source.

V

THE LAST PROTEST

In the last essay we have followed Greek popular religion to the very threshold of Christianity, till we found not only a soil ready for the seed of Christian metaphysic, but a large number of the plants already in full and exuberant growth. A complete history of Greek religion ought, without doubt, to include at least the rise of Christianity and the growth of the Orthodox Church, but, of course, the present series of studies does not aim at completeness. We will take the Christian theology for granted as we took the cla.s.sical Greek philosophy, and will finish with a brief glance at the Pagan reaction of the fourth century, when the old religion, already full of allegory, mysticism, asceticism, and Oriental influences, raised itself for a last indignant stand against the all-prevailing deniers of the G.o.ds.

This period, however, admits a rather simpler treatment than the others.

It so happens that for the last period of paganism we actually possess an authoritative statement of doctrine, something between a creed and a catechism. It seems to me a doc.u.ment so singularly important and, as far as I can make out, so little known, that I shall venture to print it entire.

A creed or catechism is, of course, not at all the same thing as the real religion of those who subscribe to it. The rules of metre are not the same thing as poetry; the rules of cricket, if the a.n.a.logy may be excused, are not the same thing as good play. Nay, more. A man states in his creed only the articles which he thinks it right to a.s.sert positively against those who think otherwise. His deepest and most practical beliefs are those on which he acts without question, which have never occurred to him as being open to doubt. If you take on the one hand a number of persons who have accepted the same creed but lived in markedly different ages and societies, with markedly different standards of thought and conduct, and on the other an equal number who profess different creeds but live in the same general environment, I think there will probably be more real ident.i.ty of religion in the latter group. Take three orthodox Christians, enlightened according to the standards of their time, in the fourth, the sixteenth, and the twentieth centuries respectively, I think you will find more profound differences of religion between them than between a Methodist, a Catholic, a Freethinker, and even perhaps a well-educated Buddhist or Brahmin at the present day, provided you take the most generally enlightened representatives of each cla.s.s. Still, when a student is trying to understand the inner religion of the ancients, he realizes how immensely valuable a creed or even a regular liturgy would be.

Literature enables us sometimes to approach pretty close, in various ways, to the minds of certain of the great men of antiquity, and understand how they thought and felt about a good many subjects. At times one of these subjects is the accepted religion of their society; we can see how they criticized it or rejected it. But it is very hard to know from their reaction against it what that accepted religion really was. Who, for instance, knows Herodotus's religion? He talks in his penetrating and garrulous way, 'sometimes for children and sometimes for philosophers,' as Gibbon puts it, about everything in the world; but at the end of his book you find that he has not opened his heart on this subject. No doubt his profession as a reciter and story-teller prevented him. We can see that Thucydides was sceptical; but can we fully see what his scepticism was directed against, or where, for instance, Nikias would have disagreed with him, and where he and Nikias both agreed against us?

We have, of course, the systems of the great philosophers--especially of Plato and Aristotle. Better than either, perhaps, we can make out the religion of M. Aurelius. Amid all the harshness and plainness of his literary style, Marcus possessed a gift which has been granted to few, the power of writing down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of witnesses or any striving after effect. He does not seem to have tried deliberately to reveal himself, yet he has revealed himself in that short personal note-book almost as much as the great inspired egotists, Rousseau and St. Augustine. True, there are some pa.s.sages in the book which are unintelligible to us; that is natural in a work which was not meant to be read by the public; broken flames of the white pa.s.sion that consumed him bursting through the armour of his habitual accuracy and self-restraint.

People fail to understand Marcus, not because of his lack of self-expression, but because it is hard for most men to breathe at that intense height of spiritual life, or, at least, to breathe soberly. They can do it if they are allowed to abandon themselves to floods of emotion, and to lose self-judgement and self-control. I am often rather surprised at good critics speaking of Marcus as 'cold'. There is as much intensity of feeling in ?? e?? ?a?t?? as in most of the n.o.bler modern books of religion, only there is a sterner power controlling it. The feeling never amounts to complete self-abandonment. 'The Guiding Power'

never trembles upon its throne, and the emotion is severely purged of earthly dross. That being so, we children of earth respond to it less readily.

Still, whether or no we can share Marcus's religion, we can at any rate understand most of it. But even then we reach only the personal religion of a very extraordinary man; we are not much nearer to the religion of the average educated person--the background against which Marcus, like Plato, ought to stand out. I believe that our conceptions of it are really very vague and various. Our great-grandfathers who read 'Tully's _Offices_ and _Ends_' were better informed than we. But there are many large and apparently simple questions about which, even after reading Cicero's philosophical translations, scholars probably feel quite uncertain. Were the morals of Epictetus or the morals of Part V of the Anthology most near to those of real life among respectable persons? Are there not subjects on which Plato himself sometimes makes our flesh creep? What are we to feel about slavery, about the exposing of children? True, slavery was not peculiar to antiquity; it flourished in a civilized and peculiarly humane people of English blood till a generation ago. And the history of infanticide among the finest modern nations is such as to make one reluctant to throw stones, and even doubtful in which direction to throw them. Still, these great facts and others like them have to be understood, and are rather hard to understand, in their bearing on the religious life of the ancients.

Points of minor morals again are apt to surprise a reader of ancient literature. We must remember, of course, that they always do surprise one, in every age of history, as soon as its manners are studied in detail. One need not go beyond Salimbene's Chronicle, one need hardly go beyond Macaulay's History, or any of the famous French memoirs, to realize that. Was it really an ordinary thing in the first century, as Philo seems to say, for gentlemen at dinner-parties to black one another's eyes or bite one another's ears off?[177:1] Or were such practices confined to some Smart Set? Or was Philo, for his own purposes, using some particular scandalous occurrence as if it was typical?

St. Augustine mentions among the virtues of his mother her unusual meekness and tact. Although her husband had a fiery temper, she never had bruises on her face, which made her a _rara avis_ among the matrons of her circle.[177:2] Her circle, presumably, included Christians as well as Pagans and Manicheans. And Philo's circle can scarcely be considered Pagan. Indeed, as for the difference of religion, we should bear in mind that, just at the time we are about to consider, the middle of the fourth century, the conduct of the Christians, either to the rest of the world or to one another, was very far from evangelical. Ammia.n.u.s says that no savage beasts could equal its cruelty; Ammia.n.u.s was a pagan; but St. Gregory himself says it was like h.e.l.l.[178:1]

I have expressed elsewhere my own general answer to this puzzle.[178:2]

Not only in early Greek times, but throughout the whole of antiquity the possibility of all sorts of absurd and atrocious things lay much nearer, the protective forces of society were much weaker, the strain on personal character, the need for real 'wisdom and virtue', was much greater than it is at the present day. That is one of the causes that make antiquity so interesting. Of course, different periods of antiquity varied greatly, both in the conventional standard demanded and in the spiritual force which answered or surpa.s.sed the demand. But, in general, the strong governments and orderly societies of modern Europe have made it infinitely easier for men of no particular virtue to live a decent life, infinitely easier also for men of no particular reasoning power or scientific knowledge to have a more or less scientific or sane view of the world.

That, however, does not carry us far towards solving the main problem: it brings us no nearer to knowledge of anything that we may call typically a religious creed or an authorized code of morals, in any age from Hesiod to M. Aurelius.

The book which I have ventured to call a Creed or Catechism is the work of Sall.u.s.tius _About the G.o.ds and the World_, a book, I should say, about the length of the Scottish Shorter Catechism. It is printed in the third volume of Mullach's _Fragmenta Philosophorum_; apart from that, the only edition generally accessible--and that is rare--is a duodecimo published by Allatius in 1539. Orelli's brochure of 1821 seems to be unprocurable.

The author was in all probability that Sall.u.s.tius who is known to us as a close friend of Julian before his accession, and a backer or inspirer of the emperor's efforts to restore the old religion. He was concerned in an educational edition of Sophocles--the seven selected plays now extant with a commentary. He was given the rank of prefect in 362, that of consul in 363. One must remember, of course, that in that rigorous and ascetic court high rank connoted no pomp or luxury. Julian had dismissed the thousand hairdressers, the innumerable cooks and eunuchs of his Christian predecessor. It probably brought with it only an increased obligation to live on pulse and to do without such pamperings of the body as fine clothes or warmth or was.h.i.+ng.

Julian's fourth oration, a prose hymn _To King Sun_, p??? ????? as???a, is dedicated to Sall.u.s.tius; his eighth is a 'Consolation to Himself upon the Departure of Sall.u.s.tius'. (He had been with Julian in the wars in Gaul, and was recalled by the jealousy of the emperor Constantius.) It is a touching and even a n.o.ble treatise. The nervous self-distrust which was habitual in Julian makes him write always with a certain affectation, but no one could mistake the real feeling of loss and loneliness that runs through the consolation. He has lost his 'comrade in the ranks', and now is 'Odysseus left alone'. So he writes, quoting the _Iliad_; Sall.u.s.tius has been carried by G.o.d outside the spears and arrows: 'which malignant men were always aiming at you, or rather at me, trying to wound me through you, and believing that the only way to beat me down was by depriving me of the fellows.h.i.+p of my true friend and fellow-soldier, the comrade who never flinched from sharing my dangers.'

One note recurs four times; he has lost the one man to whom he could talk as a brother; the man of 'guileless and clean free-speech',[180:1]

who was honest and unafraid and able to contradict the emperor freely because of their mutual trust. If one thinks of it, Julian, for all his gentleness, must have been an alarming emperor to converse with. His standard of conduct was not only uncomfortably high, it was also a little unaccountable. The most correct and blameless court officials must often have suspected that their master looked upon them as simply wallowing in sin. And that feeling does not promote ease or truthfulness. Julian compares his friends.h.i.+p with Sall.u.s.tius to that of Scipio and Laelius. People said of Scipio that he only carried out what Laelius told him. 'Is that true of me?' Julian asks himself. 'Have I only done what Sall.u.s.tius told me?' His answer is sincere and beautiful: ????? t? f????. It little matters who suggested, and who agreed to the suggestion; his thoughts, and any credit that came from the thoughts, are his friend's as much as his own. We happen to hear from the Christian Theodoret (_Hist._ iii. 11) that on one occasion when Julian was nearly goaded into persecution of the Christians, it was Sall.u.s.tius who recalled him to their fixed policy of toleration.

Sall.u.s.tius then may be taken to represent in the most authoritative way the Pagan reaction of Julian's time, in its final struggle against Christianity.

He was, roughly speaking, a Neo-Platonist. But it is not as a professed philosopher that he writes. It is only that Neo-Platonism had permeated the whole atmosphere of the age.[181:1] The strife of the philosophical sects had almost ceased. Just as Julian's mysticism made all G.o.ds and almost all forms of wors.h.i.+p into one, so his enthusiasm for h.e.l.lenism revered, nay, idolized, almost all the great philosophers of the past.

They were all trying to say the same ineffable thing; all lifting mankind towards the knowledge of G.o.d. I say 'almost' in both cases; for the Christians are outside the pale in one domain and the Epicureans and a few Cynics in the other. Both had committed the cardinal sin; they had denied the G.o.ds. They are sometimes lumped together as _Atheoi_.