Here then (1) in the attitude of the early Christians toward all mundane affairs as of no moment compared with those affecting their souls’ salvation; (2) in the assumed authority of Scripture as a full revelation of both earthly and heavenly things; and (3) in the assumed infallibility of the words of Jesus reported therein; we have three factors which suffice to explain why the great movement toward discovery of the orderly relations of phenomena was arrested for centuries, and theories of capricious government of the universe sheltered and upheld.
While, as has been said, the unity of the Empire secured Christianity its fortunate start; the multiform elements of which the Empire was made up—philosophic and pagan—being gradually absorbed by Christianity, secured it acceptance among the different subject-peoples. The break up of the Empire secured its supremacy.
The absorption of foreign ideas and practices by Christianity, largely through the influence of Hellenic Jews, was an added cause of arrest of inquiry. The adoption of pagan rites and customs, resting, as these did, on a bedrock of barbarism, dragged it to a lower level. The intrusion of philosophic subtleties led to terms being mistaken for explanations: as Gibbon says, “the pride of the professors and of their disciples was satisfied with the science of words.” The inchoate and mobile character of Christianity during the first three centuries gave both influences—pagan and philosophic—their opportunity. For long years the converts scattered throughout the Empire were linked together, in more or less regular federation, by the acknowledgment of Christ as Lord, and by the expectation of his second coming. There was no official priesthood, only overseers—“episkopoi”—for social purposes, who made no claims to apostolic succession; no formulated set of doctrines; no Apostles’ Creed; no dogmas of baptismal regeneration or of the real presence; no worship or apotheosis of Mary as the Mother of God; no worship of saints or relics.
On the philosophic side, it was the Greek influence in the person of the more educated converts that shaped the dogmas of the Church and sought to blend them with the occult and mysterious elements in Oriental systems, of which modern “Theosophy” is the tenuous parody. That old Greek habit of asking questions, of seeking to reach the reason of things, which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to scientific inquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals to the Old Testament touched not the Greek as they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the New Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it may seem in view of the assumed divine origin of the Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took upon itself to decide which of them were, and which were not, an integral part of supernatural revelation. The ultimate verdict, so far as the Western Church was concerned, was delivered by the Council of Carthage in the early part of the fifth century. There arose a school of Apologists, founders of theology, who, to quote Gibbon, “equipped the Christian religion for the conquest of the Roman world by changing it into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. They mingled together the metaphysics of Platonism, the doctrine of the Logos, which came from the Stoics, morality partly Platonic, partly Stoic, methods of argument and interpretation learnt from Philo, with the pregnant maxims of Jesus and the religious language of the Christian congregations.” Thus the road was opened for additions to dogmatic theology, doctrines of the Trinity, of the Virgin Birth, and whatever else could be inferentially extracted from the Scriptures, and blended with foreign ideas. The growing complexity of creed called for interpretation of it, and this obviously fell to the overseers or bishops, chosen for their special gifts of “the grace of the truth.” These met, as occasion required, to discuss subjects affecting the faith and discipline of the several groups. Among such, precedence, as a matter of course, would be accorded to the overseer of the most important Christian society in the Empire; and hence the prominence and authority, from an early period, of the bishop of Rome. In the simple and business-like act of his election as chairman of the gatherings lay the germ of the audacious and preposterous claims of the Papacy.
On the pagan side, the course of development is not so easily traced. To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now impossible; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews: and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire fitted in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the Euphrates, to the Empire’s westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep-seated superstition. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of Christianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name.
It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact sent thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in literary antiquities of the type of Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the search after parallels, which have received astonishing confirmation in our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the “arch-deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices,” as the Romanist missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected of him, recognises the continuity of ideas: “mutato nomine tantum; Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as ‘the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,’ and the Αποθέωσις of the Heathen surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes ‘by Switzers under a Canopie’ is a ‘Relique of the Divine Honours given to Cæsar’; the carriage of Images in Procession ‘a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.’ ... ‘The Heathen had also their Aqua Lustralis, that is to say, Holy Water. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their Holy Dayes. They had their Bacchanalia, and we have our Wakes answering to them; They their Saturnalia, and we our Carnevalls and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about May-Poles; and Dancing is one kind of worship; They had their Procession called Ambarvalia, and we our Procession about the Fields in the Rogation week.’”
Middleton examined the matter on the spot, and in his celebrated Letter from Rome gives numerous examples of “an exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism.” Since few read his book now-a-days, some of these may be cited, because their presence goes far to explain why the conglomerate religion which Christianity had become was proof against ideas spurned alike by pagans and ecclesiastics. Visiting the place for classical study, and “not to notice the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the present Religion,” Middleton soon found himself “still in old Heathen Rome,” with its rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed down by an uninterrupted succession from the priests of old to the priests of new Rome. The “smoak of the incense” in the churches transports him to the temple of the Paphian Venus described by Virgil (Æneid, I, 420); the surpliced boy waiting on the priest with the thurible reminds him of sculptures on ancient bas-reliefs representing heathen sacrifice, with a white-clad attendant on a priest holding a little chest or box in his hand. The use of holy water suggests numerous parallels. At the entrance to Pagan temples stood vases of holy liquid, a mixture of salt and common water; and, on bas-reliefs, the aspergillum or brush for the ceremony of sprinkling is carved. In the annual festival of the benediction of horses, when the animals were sent to the convent of St. Anthony to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus blest “for about eighteenpence of our money”) there is the survival of a ceremony in the Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines of the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a passage in Herodotus as to the use of lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that lamps to the Madonna took the place of those before the images of the Lares, whose chapels stood at the corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 A. D.) forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day in cemeteries lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but the custom was too deeply rooted to be abolished. As for votive offerings, Middleton truly says that “no one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned by all their writers” ... “but the most common of all offerings were pictures representing the history of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor.” Of which offerings, the blessed Virgin is so sure always to carry off the greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what Juvenal says of the Goddess Isis, whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in Rome, that the “painters got their livelihood out of her.” Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on Prognostications. Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a friend: “You, who think the gods take no care of human affairs, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people, for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe into harbour?” “Yes,” answered Diagoras, “I see how it is; for those are never painted who happen to be drowned.” There is nothing new under the sun. Horace (Odes, Bk. I, v) tells of the shipwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thank-offering in the temple of the sea-god who had preserved him; Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century, that is, some 1,500 years after Horace, describes the classic custom of ex voto offerings at length, while Pennant the antiquary, describing the well of Saint Winifred in Flintshire in the last century, tells of the votive offerings, in the shape of crutches and other objects, which were hung about it. To this day the store is receiving additions. The sick crowd thither as of old they crowded into the temples of Æsculapius and Serapis; mothers bring their sick children as in Imperial Rome they took them to the Temple of Romulus and Remus. A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a plunge in the bath itself, is followed by prayers at the altar of the chapel which incloses the well. When the saint’s feast-day is held, the afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. Perhaps one of the most pathetic sights in Catholic churches, especially in out-of-the-way villages, is the altars on which are hung votive offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the worshipper has been delivered.
As to the images, tricked out in curious robes and gewgaws, Middleton “could not help recollecting the picture which old Homer draws of Q. Hecuba of Troy, prostrating herself before the miraculous Image of Pallas,” while his wonder at the Loretto image of the “Queen of Heaven” with “a face as black as a Negus” reminds him of the reference in Baruch to the idols black with the “perpetual smoak of lamps and incense.” In his Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys refers to churches dedicated to Notre Dame in virtue of legends of discovery of images of the Virgin on the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the soil. Such a black “Madonna” was found near Grenoble, in the commune of La Zouche. Then, in the titles of the new deities, Middleton correctly sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the “great mother” of Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis, there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing examples of myths and misreadings through which certain “saints” have a place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the title of Saint Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone, Proefectus Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S. Veronica secured canonization through a blunder over the words Vera Icon: still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a mantle!
The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition of some saint or angel, call to mind “the impression of Hercules’ feet on a stone in Scythia”; the picture of the Virgin, which came from heaven, suggests the descent of Numa’s shield “from the clouds”; that of the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that “the frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of fire” (Sat., v, 97-100).
Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary formations when they struck on these suggestive classic or pagan parallels to Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had probed a comparatively recent layer; since, far beneath, lay the unsuspected prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with, and composed of, man’s earliest speculations about himself and his surroundings. When, however, we borrow an illustration from geology, it must be remembered that our divisions, like those into which the strata of the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no real detachment. The difference between former and present methods of research is that nowadays we have gone further down for discovery of the common materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilized ideas are compounded. They arise in the comparison which exists in the savage mind between the living and the non-living, and in the attribution of like qualities to things superficially resembling one another; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes active form in what may be generally termed magic. For example, the rite of baptism is explained when we connect it with barbaric lustrations and water-worship generally; as also that of the Eucharist by reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods; feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten. Middleton, himself a clergyman, shows perplexity when watching the elevation of the host at mass. He lacked that knowledge of the origin of sacramental rites which study of barbaric customs has since supplied. In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough, the “central idea” of which is “the conception of the slain god,” he shows at what an early stage in his speculations man formulated the conception of deity incarnated in himself, or in plant or animal, and as afterward slain, both the incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The god is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representative; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer: “By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament.” It is, perhaps, needless to point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching to Demeter, or to add what further parallels are suggested in the belief that Dionysus was slain, rose again, and descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. This, however, by the way. What has to be emphasized is, that in the quotation just given we have transubstantiation clearly anticipated as the barbaric idea of eating the god. In proof of the underlying continuity of that idea two witnesses—Catholic and Protestant—may be cited.