It is very true that these pagan religions from the East had their charlatans and quacks in abundance, that their noblest elements were often entangled in a mesh of magic, superstitions, and false beliefs; but Christianity too suffered from the same evils. Christianity triumphed because of its own inherent superiority to the other religions, not because its rivals were wholly evil and degrading. To fail to recognize the real moral value of oriental Paganism is to fail to understand the first centuries of our era, and so to remain blind to the true nature of the world in which Christianity established its greater worth.
Yet even if we were inclined to doubt the value of these religions from our present point of view, there could be no question of their effect upon their devotees. No one who reads the prayer of praise to Isis which Lucius offered before leaving Corinth for Rome, can mistake its sincerity: “O thou holy and eternal protectress of the human race, thou who art ever kind to care for mortals and who showest unceasingly the sweet affection of a mother for the misfortunes of wretched men, neither day nor any night, nor even the slightest moment of time passes without thy blessings; thou carest for men on land and sea, thou drivest from them the storms of life and ever extendest a saving hand, wherewith thou unravellest even the inextricable web of Fate; thou assuagest the tempests of Fortune, and thou holdest in restraint the baneful courses of the stars. Thee the gods of heaven above adore, the gods of the world below obey; thou spinnest the sphere of heaven, thou lightest the sun, guidest the universe, and tramplest Tartarus beneath thy feet. To thee the stars make answer, the seasons return, the divinities show their joy, the elements do their service. At thy nod the breezes blow, the clouds send their nourishing rains, seeds swell, and buds increase. Before thy majesty the birds who traverse the heavens are in awe, the beasts that roam the mountains, the serpents that lurk beneath the ground, the monsters that swim the deep. But I am all too weak in wit to render thy praises, too poor in purse to offer thee due sacrifice; my voice has not the eloquence to express all that I feel concerning thy majesty. Nay, had I a thousand mouths and tongues or eternal continuance of speech unbroken, it were not enough. Therefore will I try to do that which alone a devotee faithful, but poor withal, can accomplish. I will guard the memory of thy divine features and thy most holy god-head deep within my heart’s secret shrine and there keep that image forever.”[300]
It may have seemed strange to some of you that in this course of lectures we should be considering matters which at first sight appear so alien to Greek thinking as these oriental mysteries. The reason is to be found in the goal toward which we are aiming, for it has been our purpose from the beginning to trace the history of Greek religious thought through to the time when it had in large measure determined the form of Christian thought and had provided the means by which the latter could be made intelligible to the contemporary world. It is necessary therefore to examine the several elements which made up the sum total of the religious thought of the earlier Christian centuries. Moreover, as we have now seen, the purpose of the oriental mysteries was one with the aim of the Greek mysteries and with the object of the Greek mystic philosophies. Therefore we have been obliged to bring into our plan these eastern religions.
But I need not remind you that at this time there was another oriental religion spreading over the world which we have not yet considered. When Christianity was introduced to the West, it must have presented itself as a new eastern mystery. Men had long been accustomed to such religions; for centuries they had sought either through mysteries such as were celebrated at Eleusis or like those brought in from the East, to find the satisfaction of their hopes for a happy immortality. In these mysteries, as in the mystic philosophies, one of the central ideas was that of the direct vision of the divine which was a revelation of God to man. This act of grace had supplanted, or rather had been added to, the use of the reason or of the will which the philosophers had urged as the means of man’s salvation. Through a long course of centuries men had been trained by philosophy, by mystery, and by political events, until an environment had been created which was favorable to the ideas of Christianity—an environment also which was destined to influence profoundly this new religion in its earlier centuries, so that it ultimately received a form different from that foreshadowed in the teachings of its founder. The relation of Christianity to the world into which it entered and some of the reasons for its triumph will be the subject of our final lectures.
IX
CHRISTIANITY
In the previous lectures we have traced the development of Greek religious thought from the Homeric poems to the third century of our era; we have seen how Greece extended her intellectual dominion over the entire Mediterranean world which the military and political genius of Rome bound into one empire; and we have examined the chief oriental mysteries which spread throughout the same area. We now turn to Christianity. In dealing with this it will be necessary to review at some length the work of Jesus and the doctrines of Paul, that we may have in mind the material which was later brought into accord with the philosophic thought and the intellectual habits of the Roman Empire outside that district in which Christianity had its birth. But before we do this we should recall some characteristics of the ancient world in the earliest centuries of our era.
In the first place we must realize that it was a Greco-Roman world, one in which the civilizations of two great peoples—the one intellectual, the other political—had been compounded. In the eastern half of the Empire Greek influence dominated. Alexander’s conquests had made Greek the common language of a great area with the result that in the East Greek thought and Greek habits of expression—that is to say, Greek philosophy and Greek rhetoric—were practically native. The West also, as I have earlier tried to show, had received Greek philosophy and Greek rhetoric more than a century and a half before our era, so that indeed over all the Roman Empire common habits of thought and universal modes of expression prevailed. The eastern half of the Empire contained Alexandria, which had been the chief intellectual center from the third century before our era; in the West was Rome, the center of that imperial power which made the world a political unit; yet western thought owed not merely its form but almost its existence to Greek influences.
In the second place the East was the home of the learning of the world. The Greeks furnished the West not only philosophy and rhetoric but the sciences as well. Building on the mathematics and astronomy which they had learned from their Eastern neighbors and the Egyptians they soon developed these two sister sciences. Tradition says that in the sixth century b.c. the philosopher Thales predicted an eclipse of the sun; certainly a century later the Greeks had made great advances; and such were their attainments by the opening of our era that only in comparatively modern times has a new period in the history of astronomy and mathematics begun. In the descriptive sciences of botany and zoölogy especially the Greeks had reached a high position by the fourth century b.c. The work of Aristotle, of Theophrastus, and of others still holds the profound respect of all modern scientists who are familiar with the history of their subjects. In geography and mineralogy also their accomplishments were not inconsiderable; likewise in many branches of physics they did notable work; while Greek scientific medicine, already highly developed in Hippocrates’ day (c. 460-377 b.c.), was further advanced in the succeeding centuries. The works of Galen (129-c. 199 a.d.) remained the authoritative treatises for more than fourteen hundred years. All these sciences the Romans learned from the Greeks, and although in some fields they made notable application of their lessons, they never surpassed their teachers.