Early in the hour I spoke of Aeneas’ journey through the lower world as an initiation by which he was enlightened and strengthened for the great task that lay before him; and we have now seen that in all the mysteries, both Greek and oriental, there were initiatory rites, in which the novice symbolically died to the old life and was born again into a new existence. Moreover, through his emotional experience he received assurance that his salvation was secure forever. The idea of the new birth belongs to Christianity also from the first. Paul held that it was brought about by faith; the author of the Fourth Gospel taught that it was secured by love and belief. Baptism in primitive Christianity was at first symbolical—an act of ritual purification, which was believed to indicate the remission of sins and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.[37] But by the second century Christianity had become a mystery in the Greek sense, into which the novice, after a period of preparation, was duly initiated by baptism; and indeed the act was believed to have a magic power to secure immortality, closely parallel to that of the pagan initiation.[38] We all know that the ecclesiastical confidence which such belief inspires is far from unknown today.
Again you will recall that when Anchises’ shade was instructing Aeneas in the meaning of life and death, he said:
“Nor when to life’s last beam they bid farewell
May sufferers cease from pain, nor quite be freed
From all their fleshly plagues; but by fixed law,
The strange, inveterate taint works deeply in.
For this, the chastisement of evils past
Is suffered here, and full requital paid.
Some hang on high, outstretched to viewless winds;
For some their sin’s contagion must be purged
In vast ablution of deep-rolling seas,
Or burned away in fire. Each man receives
His ghostly portion in the world of dark.”
Thus the sojourn of the soul in the world below for the thousand years which must elapse before it could be born again, was a period of cleansing from ancient sin. This idea of purification we have already seen to be as old as the Orphics; it was made an important element by Plato; and indeed all who held to the doctrine of rebirths regarded the periods between earthly existences as times of moral punishment and cleansing. There were certain analogies in Mithraism. Orthodox Christianity could not adopt the doctrine of metempsychosis, although some Gnostics found this possible, by rejecting the resurrection of the body. But beyond question the Greek doctrine of post-mortem purgation from sin, combining with ideas inherited from the Old Testament, has been influential in the development of a Christian belief in purification, especially by fire, in an intermediate state between death and paradise. The doctrine of purgatory, in somewhat different forms, has been held by both the Eastern and the Western Churches. Although this doctrine did not become a definite part of the theology of the Western Church until the time of Gregory the Great (590-604), nevertheless traces of it can be found in the earlier Church writers. Origen held that even the perfect must pass through fire after death;[39] St. Augustine was less confident, but he thought it not past belief that imperfect souls might be saved by cleansing flames.[40] The Western Church, from St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth to Bellarmino in the sixteenth century held the doctrine that the cleansing fire was as material as that of any Stoic; but today that view has in large part been abandoned.[41]
These two illustrations must suffice to suggest the ways in which Christian thought was influenced by its pagan environment.
Finally we will consider an example of parallelism between pagan and Christian ideas. It is evident that the Greeks, who made such large use of successive rebirths, following periods of punishment and purification below, thought of these repeated lives and deaths as forming a moral series, so that moral progress, or degeneracy, at one stage was inseparably connected with both the preceding and the following stages. To them life here and life in the other world were indissolubly bound together. This was also as true of Stoicism with its limited reward for uprightness, as it was of Platonism. The Greek mysteries, which did not concern themselves with metempsychosis, by the fifth century before our era likewise made future happiness depend in part at least on righteousness in this life; the oriental mysteries too made this existence the condition of the next. In short, we may say that wherever men believed in any kind of a future existence, they almost universally held to the common belief that future happiness was to be the reward of a virtuous life on earth. But this is one of the fundamental principles of Christianity. Paganism, therefore, was in accord on this point with its enemy, and thereby favored the propagation of the new religion; moreover, the superior ethical demands of Christianity and its humanitarian principles no doubt found a ready response, especially in enlightened circles.
So we have returned to that which seems to me most important in the relations of paganism and of early Christianity. In many ways paganism provided an environment favorable for the spread of the religion which Jesus founded. The two were at many points irreconcilable, and the former has not always benefited the latter by its influence; but it is a grave historical error not to recognize the areas in which the thought of the two ran parallel. Is the nobler faith the poorer because its paths were made broad by the pagan in his search after Immortality?