The establishment of Christianity responded to this cry of all tender and weary souls. Christianity could only have had birth and expansion in a time when there were no longer free cities. If there was any thing totally lacking in the founders of the Church, it was patriotism. They were not cosmopolites, for the entire planet was to them a place of exile: they were idealists in the most absolute sense.
A country is a composition of soul and body. The soul is the souvenirs, the legends, the customs, the misfortunes, the hopes, the common sorrows: the body is the soil, the race, the language, the mountains, the rivers, the characteristic productions. Now, was a people ever more wanting in all this than the first Christians? They did not cling to Judæa; after a few years they had forgotten Galilee; the glory of Greece and Rome was indifferent to them. The countries in which Christianity was first established—Syria, Cyprus, and Asia Minor—no longer remembered the time when they were free. Greece and Rome, it is true, still had a grand national sentiment. At Rome, patriotism survived in a few families; in Greece, Christianity flourished only at Corinth,—a city which, since its destruction by Mummius, and its reconstruction by Cæsar, was the resort of men of all races. The true Greek countries, then, as to-day, very jealous, very much absorbed in the memories of their past, gave little countenance to the new doctrines: they were always lukewarm Christians. On the contrary, those gay, indolent, voluptuous countries of Asia and Syria, countries of pleasure, of free manners, de laisser aller, accustomed to receive life and government from others, had nothing to resign in the way of pride and traditions. The most ancient capitals of Christianity—Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Rome—were common cities, so to speak, cities of the modern type of Alexandria, in which all races met, where that marriage between man and the soil, which constitutes a nation, was absolutely broken.
The importance given to social questions is always the inverse of political pre-occupations. Socialism takes the lead when patriotism grows weak. Christianity exploded the social and religious ideas, as was inevitable, since Augustus had put an end to political struggles. Christianity, if a universal worship, would, like Islamism, in reality be the enemy of nationalities. Only centuries, only schisms, could form national churches from a religion which was from the beginning a denial of all terrestrial countries, which had its birth at an epoch in which there were no longer in the world either cities or citizens, and which the old and powerful republics of Italy and of Greece would surely have expelled as a mortal poison to the State.
And here was one of the causes of the grandeur of the new religion. Humanity is a multiform, changeable thing, tormented by conflicting desires. La patrie is grand, and the heroes of Marathon and Thermopylæ are saints. But one's country is not all here below: one is a man and a son of God, before he is a Frenchman, or a German. The kingdom of God, an eternal dream which is never destroyed in the heart of man, is a protestation against a too exclusive patriotism. The thought of an organization of humanity, in view of its greatest happiness and its moral amelioration, is legitimate. The State knows, and can only know, one thing,—to organize a collective egoism. This is not indifference, because egoism is the most powerful and seizable of human motives, but is not sufficient. The governments which have rested upon the supposition that man is composed of covetous instincts only, have deceived themselves. Devotion is as natural as egoism to a true-born man. The organization of devotion is religion: let no one hope, then, to dispense with religion, or religious associations. Each progression of modern society will render this want more imperious.
A great exaltation of religious sentiment was, then, the consequence of the Roman peace established by Augustus. Augustus realized it. But I ask, What satisfaction could the institutions which Rome dared to believe eternal present to the religious wants which were arising? Surely almost nothing. All the old worships, of very different origin, had one common trait. They shared equally the impossibility of reaching a theological teaching, a practical morality, an edifying preaching, a pastoral ministry truly fruitful for the people. The Pagan temple, in its best time, was the same thing as the synagogue and the church: I wish to say the common house, the school, the inn, the hospital, the shelter in which the poor sought an asylum, it was a cold cella, into which one seldom entered, where one learned nothing. The affectation which led the Roman patricians to distinguish the "religion," that is to say, their own worship, from the "superstition," that is to say, the worship of strangers, appears to us puerile. All the Pagan worships were essentially superstitious. The peasant who in our day places a sou in the box of a miraculous chapel, who invokes some saint on account of his oxen, or his horses, who drinks certain waters for certain maladies, is in these acts a Pagan. Indeed, nearly all our superstitions are the remains of a religion anterior to Christianity, which that has not been able to entirely uproot. If one would find the image of Paganism in our day, it must be sought in some obscure village in the depth of some out-of-the-way country.
Having as guardians a popular, vacillating tradition, and selfish sacristans, the Pagan religion could but degenerate in worship. Augustus, although with a certain reserve, accepted the adoration of his subjects in the provinces. Tiberius allowed, under his own eyes, that ignoble concourse of the cities of Asia to dispute the honor of raising a temple to him. The extravagant impieties of Caligula produced no re-action: outside of Judaism there was not found a single priest to resist such follies. Coming forth, for the most part, from a primitive worship of natural forces ten times transformed by minglings of all sorts, and by the imagination of the peoples, the Pagan worships were limited by their past. One could never draw from them what had never existed in them,—Deism or instruction. The fathers of the church amuse us when they bring to notice the misdeeds of Saturn as the father of a family, and of Jupiter as a husband. But without doubt, it was still more ridiculous to set up Jupiter (that is to say, the atmosphere) as a moral god who commands, defends, rewards, and punishes. In a world which aspires to possess a catechism, what could one do with a worship like that of Venus, which arose from an old social necessity of the first Phœnician navigation in the Mediterranean, but became in time an outrage to that which one regards more and more as the essence of religion?
Here is the explanation of that singular attraction, which, towards the commencement of our era, drew the populations of the Old World towards the worships of the East. These worships had something more profound than the Greek and Latin worships: they appealed, moreover, to the religious sentiment. Almost all were relative to the state of the soul in another life, and they were believed to contain some pledges of immortality. From this arose that favor which the Thracian and Sabasian mysteries enjoyed, the worshippers of Bacchus, and brotherhoods of all sorts. There was less of coldness in these little circles, in which one pressed against another, than in the great glacial world elsewhere. Some minor religions, like that of [Psyche], destined solely to console for death, had immense popularity. Those noble Egyptian worships which concealed the emptiness within by grand splendor of ceremonies counted their devotees throughout the empire. Isis and Serapis had their altars at the extremities of the world. In visiting the ruins of Pompeii, one would be tempted to believe that the worship of Isis was the principal one practised there. Those little Egyptian temples had some assiduous devotees, among whom were counted a large number of persons of the class of the friends of Catullus and Tibullus. There was a service each morning,—a sort of mass, celebrated by a tonsured and beardless priest; there were some sprinklings of holy water, and perhaps an evening service: it occupied, amused, and quieted. What more is necessary?
But, more than all others, the Mithraic worship enjoyed in the second and third centuries an extraordinary popularity. I sometimes allow myself to say, that, had not Christianity taken the lead, Mithraicism would have become the religion of the world. Mithraicism had mysterious re-unions, and chapels which strongly resembled little churches. It established a very solid bond of brotherhood between its votaries; it had the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, and bore such a resemblance to the Christian mysteries, that the good Justin the Apologist saw only one explanation of these resemblances: it is that Satan, in order to deceive the human race, sought to mimic the Christian ceremonies, and committed this plagiarism. The Mithraic tomb of the Catacombs of Rome is as edifying and deeply mysterious as the Christian tombs. There were some devoted Mithraists, who, even after the triumph of Christianity, defended the sincerity of their faith with courage. The people grouped themselves around these foreign gods: around the Greek and Italiote gods there were no gatherings. We must say a good word for it: it is only the small sects that lay the foundation and build up. It is so sweet to believe one's self a little aristocracy of truth, to imagine, that, in common with a very few, one owns the repository of truth! Such a foolish sect in our own time gives to its adherents more consolation than a more healthy philosophy. In his day, Abracadabra secured some joyous followers, and, by means of a little good-will, a sublime theology has been found in him.
We shall see, however, in our next conference, that the religious reign of the future belonged neither to Serapis, nor to Mithra. The predestined religion grew imperceptibly in Judæa. This would have greatly astonished the most sagacious Romans, if [it] had been announced to them. It would have been shocking to them in the highest degree. But so often in history have improbable predictions become true, so often has wisdom been mistaken, that it is not best to rely too much upon the likes and dislikes of enlightened men, of bons esprits as we say, when they undertake to predict the future.