The church which was built upon this rock—and that Rock was Christ—has shown its continuity with earlier religions in a thousand ways and by a thousand analogies. Solar and astrological elements have been freely admitted, side by side with those which recall the corn and wine gods. The chief festivals still cling to the solar feasts of the equinoxes and the solstices. Thus every year the church celebrates in mimicry the death and resurrection of the Christ, as the Mediterranean peoples celebrated the death and resurrection of the Attis, the Adonis, the Dionysus, the Osiris. It celebrates the feast at the usual time for most such festivals, the spring equinox. More than that, it chooses for the actual day of the resurrection, commonly called in English Easter, and in the Latin dialects the Paschal feast (or Pâques), a trebly astrological date. The festival must be as near as possible to the spring equinox; but it must be after a full moon, and it must be on the day sacred to the sun. Before the feast, a long fast takes place, at the close of which the Christ is slain in effigy, and solemnly laid in a mimic sepulchre. Good Friday is the anniversary of his piacular death, and the special day of the annual mourning, as for Adonis and Attis. On Easter Sunday, he rises again from the dead, and every good Catholic is bound to communicate—to eat the body of his slaughtered god on the annual spring festival of reviving vegetation. Comparison of the Holy Week ceremonies at Rome with the other annual festivals, from the Mexican corn-feast and the Potraj rite of India to Attis and Adonis, will be found extremely enlightening—I mean, of course, the ceremonies as they were when the Pope, the Priest-King, the representative of the annual Attis at Pessinus, officiated publicly in the Sistine Chapel, with paschal music known as Lamentations, and elevation of the Host amid the blare of trumpets. On this subject, I limit myself to the barest hint. Whoever chooses to follow out so pregnant a clue will find it lead him into curious analogies and almost incredible survivals.
Similarly, the birth of Christ is celebrated at the winter solstice, the well-known date for so many earlier ceremonies of the gods of vegetation. Then the infant god lies unconscious in his cradle. Whoever has read Mr. Frazer’s great work will understand the connexion of the holly and the mistletoe, and the Christmas tree, with this second great festival of Christendom, very important in the Teutonic north, though far inferior in the south to the spring-tide feast, when the god is slain and eaten of necessity. I limit myself to saying that the Christmas rites are all of them rites of the birth of the corn-god.
Even the Christian cross, it is now known, was not employed as a symbol of the faith before the days of Constantine, and was borrowed from the solar wheel of the Gaulish sun-god-worshippers who formed the mass of the successful emperor’s legionaries.
We are now, therefore, in a very different position for understanding the causes which led to the rise and development of the Christian religion from that which we occupied at the outset of our enquiry. We had then to accept crudely the bare fact that about the first century of our era a certain cult of a Divine Man, Jesus, arose among a fraction of the maritime people of Lower Syria. That fact as we at first received it stood isolated and unrelated in its naked singularity. We can now see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency in human nature, high or low; and in our last chapter we shall find that this universal tendency to worship the dead has ever since persisted as fully as ever, and is in fact the central element in the entire religious instinct of humanity.
The main emotional chord upon which Christianity played in its early days—and indeed the main chord upon which it still plays—is just, I believe, the universal feeling in favour of the deification or beatification of the dead, with the desire for immortality on the part of the individual believer himself in person. Like all other religions, but even more than any other religion at that time in vogue, Christianity appealed to these two allied and deep-seated longings of human nature. It appealed on the one hand to the unselfish emotions and affections of mankind by promising a close, bodily, personal, and speedy reassociation of the living believer with his dead relatives and friends. It appealed on the other hand to the selfish wishes and desires of each, by holding forth to every man the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. Like all other creeds, but beyond all other creeds, it was the religion of immortality, of the dead revived, of the new world: in an age of doubt, of scepticism, of the decay of faith, it gave fresh life and a totally new basis to the old beliefs—perhaps the old delusions—of the religious nature.
A necessary consequence of the universal ferment and intermixture of pantheons everywhere during the early days of the Roman empire was a certain amount of floating scepticism about the gods as a whole, which reaches its highest point in the mocking humour of Lucian, or still earlier in the Epicurean atheism of Lucretius and of Roman philosophy in general. But while this nascent scepticism was very real and very widespread, it affected rather current beliefs as to the personality and history of the various gods than the underlying conception of godhead in the abstract. Even those who laughed and those who disbelieved, retained at bottom many superstitions and supernatural ideas. Their scepticism was due, not like that of our own time to fundamental criticism of the very notion of the supernatural, but to the obvious inadequacy of existing gods to satisfy the requirements of educated cosmopolitans. The deities of the time were too coarse, too childish, too gross for their worshippers. The common philosophic attitude of cultivated Rome and cultivated Alexandria might be compared to some extent to that of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed hostile to the conception of theology in its own nature, but who demur to the most miraculous and supernatural part of the popular doctrine.
With the mass, however, the religious unrest showed itself mainly, as it always shows itself at such critical moments, in a general habit of running after new and strange religions, from some one or other of which the anxious enquirer hopes to obtain some divine answer to his doubts and difficulties. When old faiths decay, there is room for new ones. As might have been expected, this tendency was most clearly shown in the great cosmopolitan trading towns, where men of many nations rubbed shoulders together, and where outlandish cults of various sorts had their temples and their adherents. Especially was this the case at Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, the capitals respectively of the Roman, the Hellenic, and the Semitic worlds. In the Græco-Egyptian metropolis, the worship of Serapis, a composite deity of hybrid origin, grew gradually into the principal cult of the teeming city. At Antioch, Hellenic deities were ousting the Baalim. At Rome, the worship of Isis, of Jahweh, of Syrian and other remoter Eastern gods was carried on by an ever-increasing body of the foreign, native, and servile population. These were the places where Christianity spread. The men of the villages were long, as the world still quaintly phrases it, “pagans.”
The strange cults which united in thus gradually crushing out the old local and national pantheons throughout the Roman world, had for the most part two marked attributes in common: they were more or less mystical; and they tended more or less in the direction of monotheism. Solar myth, syncretism, the esoteric priestly interpretations, and the general diffusion of Greek philosophic notions, mixed with subtler oriental and Zoroastrian ideas, had all promoted the rise and growth of the mystic element: while a vague monotheistic movement had long been apparent in the higher thought of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the East. In the resulting conflict and intermixture of ideas, Judaism, as one of the most mystical and monotheistic of religions, would have stood a good chance of becoming the faith of the world, had it not been for the fatal weight of its strict and obstinate national character. Even as it was, Jewish communities were scattered through all the commercial towns of the Græco-Roman world; a Jewish colony strongly influenced Alexandria; and Jewish teachers made proselytes in Rome in the very bosom of the imperial household.
The ferment which thus existed by the Orontes, the Nile, and the Tiber must also have extended in a somewhat less degree to all the cosmopolitan seaports and trading towns of the great and heterogeneous military empire. What was true of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, was true in part, we have every reason to believe, of Damascus, of Byzantium, of Sinope, of Ephesus: of Rhodes, of Cyrene, of Athens, of Carthage; perhaps even of Massilia, of Gades, of Burdigala, of Lugdunum. All around the eastern Mediterranean at least, new faiths were seething, new ideas were brewing, new mysticisms were being evolved, new superstitions were arising, Phoenix-like, out of the dying embers of decaying creeds. Setting aside mere exotic or hybrid cults, like the worship of Serapis at Alexandria and of Isis at Rome, or mere abortive attempts like the short-lived worship of Antinous in Egypt, we may say that three of these new religions appealed strongly to the wants and desires of the time: and those three were Mithraism, Gnosticism, and Christianity.
All were alike somewhat eclectic in character; and all could lay claim to a certain cosmopolitan and catholic spirit unknown to the cults of the old national pantheons. All came to the Greek and Roman world from the mystic east, the land of the rising sun, whose magic is felt even at the present day by the votaries of Theosophy and of Esoteric Buddhism. Which of the three was to conquer in the end might have seemed at one time extremely doubtful: nor indeed do I believe that the ultimate triumph of Christianity, the least imposing of the three, inevitable as it at last became, was by any means at first a foregone conclusion. The religion of Jesus probably owed quite as much to what we call chance—that is to say, to the play of purely personal and casual circumstances—as to its own essential internal characteristics. If Constantine or any other shrewd military chief had happened to adopt the symbols of Mithra or Abraxas instead of the name of Christ, it is quite conceivable that all the civilised world might now be adoring the mystic divinity of the three hundred and sixty-five emanations, as sedulously as it actually adores the final theological outcome of the old Hebrew Jahweh. But there were certain real advantages as well, which told, I believe, in the very nature of things, in favour of the Christ as against the coinage of Basilides or the far-eastern sun-god. Constantine, in other words, chose his religion wisely. It was the cult exactly adapted to the times: above all others, during the two centuries or so that had passed since its first beginning (for we must place the real evolution of the Christian system considerably later than the life or death of Jesus himself) it had shown itself capable of thoroughly engaging on its own side the profoundest interests and emotions of the religious nature.