“‘AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?’ cried one who had just been made a director.”
(1) See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
(2) Published at Leipzig about 1893.
XIII.
THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of that special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each religion or cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its own special characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of the Christian branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?
We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude towards Sex was one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that whereas most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure and the world of the senses, Christianity—following largely on Judaism—displayed a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the mind. The same tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults of that period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40) chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making themselves “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” or the rich Roman lady for plunging in the wintry Tiber for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later pagans “the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul” had become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the most powerful reaction against this; and this reaction had, as indicated in the last chapter, the enormously valuable result that (for the time) it disentangled love from sex and established Love, pure and undefiled, as ruler of the world. “God is Love.” But, as also indicated, the divorce between the two elements of human nature, carried to an extreme, led in time to a crippling of both elements and the development of a certain morbidity and self-consciousness which, it cannot be denied, is painfully marked among some sections of Christians—especially those of the altruistic and ‘philanthropic’ type.
Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in its way but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on “morality.” Some modern writers indeed have gone so far—forgetting, I suppose, the Stoics—as to claim that Christianity’s chief mark is its high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that, in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been much more ‘moral’ as a rule—that is, ready as individuals to pay respect to the needs of the community—than the later and more civilized societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call civic duty to one’s neighbor, the Christian made morality to consist more especially in a man’s duty to God. It became with them a private affair between a man’s self and God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief inspiration was not the helping of one’s fellow-man but the saving of one’s own soul.
There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we may recognize these two—(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b) the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather than a public sense of duty to one’s neighbor and to society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led to this differentiation.
Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all directions; tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one. The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of the Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions, philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other. (1) A great fusion was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great religious movement would have a world-wide character.
(1) For an enlargement on this theme see Glover’s Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of Early Christianity (University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for instance (a resurrection-cult), “was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus when Paul preached there,” and the worship of Isis and Serapis had already reached then, Rome and Naples.