Even the gods, with whom the believers thought they were uniting themselves in their mystic outbursts, were more human and sometimes more sensual than those of the Occident. The latter had that quietude of soul in which the philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to revive again.[[12]] Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with exultation his birth to a new life. Or else they joined in the passion of Mithra, condemned to create the world in suffering. This common grief and joy were often expressed with savage violence, by bloody mutilations, long wails of despair, and extravagant acclamations. The manifestations of the extreme fanaticism of those barbarian races that had not been touched by Greek skepticism and the very ardor of their faith inflamed the souls of the multitudes attracted by the exotic gods.
The Oriental religions touched every chord of sensibility and satisfied the thirst for religious emotion that the austere Roman creed had been unable to quench.
But at the same time they satisfied the intellect more fully, and this is my second point.
In very early times Greece—later imitated by Rome—became resolutely rationalistic: her greatest originality lies here. Her philosophy was purely laical; thought was unrestrained by any sacred tradition; it even pretended to pass judgment upon these traditions and condemned or approved of them. Being sometimes hostile, sometimes indifferent and some times conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics by means of which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment of reflection. It became a thing devoid of sense, whose raison d'être was no longer understood; it embodied dead ideas and an obsolete conception of the world. In Greece as well as at Rome it was reduced to a collection of unintelligible rites, scrupulously and mechanically reproduced without addition or omission because they had been practised by the ancestors of long ago, and formulas hallowed by the mos maiorum, that were no longer understood or sincerely cherished. Never did a people of advanced culture have a more infantile religion.
The Oriental civilizations on the contrary were sacerdotal in character. As in medieval Europe, the scholars of Asia and Egypt were priests. In the temples the nature of the gods and of man were not the only subjects of discussion; mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philology and history were also studied. The successors of Berosus, a priest from Babylonia, and
Manetho, a priest from Heliopolis, were considered deeply versed in all intellectual disciplines as late as the time of Strabo.[[13]]
This state of affairs proved detrimental to the progress of science. Researches were conducted according to preconceived ideas and were perverted through strange prejudices. Astrology and magic were the monstrous fruit of a hybrid union. But all this certainly gave religion a power it had never possessed either in Greece or Rome.
All results of observation, all conquests of thought, were used by an erudite clergy to attain the principal object of their activities, the solution of the problem of the destiny of man and matter, and of the relations of heaven and earth. An ever enlarging conception of the universe kept transforming the modes of belief. Faith presumed to enslave both physics and metaphysics. The credit of every discovery was given to the gods. Thoth in Egypt and Bel in Chaldea were the revealers not only of theology and the ritual, but of all human knowledge.[[14]] The names of the Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish an alleged method of divination; formulas of incantation, supposed to subject divine powers to the magician, were combined with chemical experiments and medical prescriptions.
This intimate union of erudition and faith continued
in the Latin world. Theology became more and more a process of deification of the principles or agents discovered by science and a worship of time regarded as the first cause, the stars whose course determined the events of this world, the four elements whose innumerable combinations produced the natural phenomena, and especially the sun which preserved heat, fertility and life. The dogmas of the mysteries of Mithra were, to a certain extent, the religious expression of Roman physics and astronomy. In all forms of pantheism the knowledge of nature appears to be inseparable from that of God.[[15]] Art itself complied more and more with the tendency to express erudite ideas by subtle symbolism, and it represented in allegorical figures the relations of divine powers and cosmic forces, like the sky, the earth, the ocean, the planets, the constellations and the winds. The sculptors engraved on stone everything man thought and taught. In a general way the belief prevailed that redemption and salvation depended on the revelation of certain truths, on a knowledge of the gods, of the world and of our person, and piety became gnosis.[[16]]