If time and subject allowed, we might draw further illustrations of the influence of paganism from the calendar of the Church, which would show how pagan festivals were supplanted by Christian; or we might examine the list of accepted saints, some of whom have heathen origins—others are composites, so to speak; or again we might turn to Christian art and see how pagan types were adapted to Christian uses. But although such studies might prove interesting, we may not enter on them now, for we have already departed somewhat from our proper theme.
Yet great as the influence of the pagan environment was on Christianity, there is always a possibility that in such a study as the present we may get a wrong point of view. We should remember that Christianity was a positive religion, which in being transformed into a Greek philosophy did not lose its own character; indeed it was not obscured by the Greek intellectual habit, but it appropriated that habit and in the end made it its own. Pagan thought and practice affected Christianity in countless ways, but they did not overwhelm it. Nor must we underestimate the service which paganism rendered the faith which was to overthrow it. The philosopher’s long search for a rule of life, the Greek and oriental mysteries, and the mystic theosophies, all provided an environment ready and favorable to Christianity. The rapid spread of this new religion, at first in Syria and Asia Minor, was not due simply to the propinquity of these countries to Palestine. They had been for centuries familiar with mystic religions which in a crude way aimed to give what Christianity promised in nobler fashion. The same thing was true in a measure of the great centers of the West. Without an environment already prepared for it Christianity would have had a very different history from the one we know. Moreover we have now abundantly seen how Greek rhetoric and philosophy furnished the forms by which Christianity made itself understood, and how they gave the intellectual weapons by which in part it gained its victory over paganism.
Now we may ask what were some of the chief reasons for Christianity’s triumph. Sometimes it is lightly said that its victory was due to the fact that it “promised immortality to a hopeless world.” But we know that there were many contemporaneous religions which promised immortality and that the world was not without hope. We must try to look somewhat more deeply, and we cannot limit ourselves wholly to intellectual causes.
The first, although not the most significant, reason may be found in the positive and noble monotheism of Christianity. Other religions by syncretistic processes arrived at a doctrine of the unity of the Divine, of one God who embraced in himself a multitude of divinities; but the new faith, supported by its Jewish inheritance, taught that God was but One and that there was no other.
Yet the most important causes are to be found in the person and mission of Jesus. He brought a new revelation of God to men; and it was a revelation which men believed the Old Testament had foretold. The Jewish Scriptures were the one body of sacred writings known to the Greco-Roman world, and their authority was enormous wherever anti-Jewish prejudices were overcome, or when, as in Christian thought, Jesus was related to its prophecies. This influence had extended to Greeks, especially in such places as Alexandria, long before Jesus began his ministry. Therefore it was natural that the Gentiles’ desire for revelation as well as the Jews’ Messianic hopes should be attached to the Old Testament, so that Christianity had the support of its weighty authority.
Again Christianity knew its saviour and redeemer not as some god whose history was contained in a myth filled with rude, primitive, and even offensive elements, as were the stories of Attis, of Osiris, and to a degree of Dionysus. Such myths required violent interpretation to make them acceptable to enlightened minds. On the contrary the Christian saviour had lived and associated with men, whose minds and senses had apprehended his person, acts, and character. These witnesses had transmitted their knowledge directly, and they had testified that the life of Jesus corresponded to his teachings. Jesus was then an historical, not a mythical being. No remote or foul myth obtruded itself on the Christian believer; his faith was founded on positive, historical, and acceptable facts.
Christianity showed a superior power of adaptation to every class; it was a practical guide of life for all, a guide which was soon recognized by its opponents to be of the highest ethical value. In spite of the human weaknesses of Christians, their superior morality was generally recognized from the time of Pliny.[385] Their motives for righteous living sprang from love and faith rather than from any social or rational sanctions; and the fruits were “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance.” These virtues and the belief that Christ’s revelation and the mystic union of man with the Divine brought salvation, could be understood by the most unlettered. The intellectual classes found Christianity fulfilling the aim of both Greek thought and of Old Testament prophecy; in it they saw the ultimate philosophy. Christianity therefore proved itself a religion which satisfied men’s desires and hopes as well as their philosophic aims in a more complete and spiritual way than oriental mysticism or Greek rationalism; and it gave a nobler assurance of salvation.
Finally, experience taught the value of Christianity; already in the second century the Apologists could make the appeal to common knowledge of the Christians to show the superiority of their faith.
Yet by the close of the second century Christianity had not won many adherents outside of Syria and Asia Minor, save in the greater cities. The third century was the period in which paganism rapidly decayed and Christianity swiftly advanced toward its triumph; by the year 300 it had filled the Mediterranean world, and the proud claim which Tertullian had made a century before, began to be justified: “We are of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your holdings, cities, houses, castles, towns, councils, your very camps, tribes, wards, the palace, the senate, the forum—we have left you only your temples.”[386] The victory over pagan religions and philosophies was indeed certain; but this success had been secured on the intellectual side by the transformation of the teachings of Jesus and of the apostles into a Greek philosophy. It is as such that Christianity has the final place in a history of Greek religious thought.