We must remember, too, that in all religious crises, while faith in the actual gods and creeds declines rapidly, no corresponding weakening occurs in the underlying sentiments on which all religions ultimately base themselves. Hence the apparent paradox that periods of doubt are also almost always periods of intense credulity as well. The human mind, cast free from the moorings which have long sufficed for it, drifts about restlessly in search of some new haven in which it may take refuge from the terrors of uncertainty and infidelity. And its new faith is always but a fresh form of the old one. A god or gods, prayer, praise, and sacraments, are essential elements. More especially is it the case that when trust in the great gods begins to fail, a blind groping after necromancy, spiritualism, and ghost-lore in general takes its place for the moment. We have seen this tendency fully exemplified in our own time by the spiritualists and others: nor was it less marked in the tempest of conflicting ideas which broke over the Roman world from the age of the Antonines to the fall of the empire. The fact is, the average man cares but little, after all, for his gods and his goddesses, viewed as individuals. They are but an outlet for his own emotions. He appeals to them for help, as long as he continues to believe in their effective helpfulness: he is ready to cajole them with offerings of blood or to flatter them with homage of praise and prayer, as long as he expects to gain some present or future benefit, bodily or spiritual, in return for his assiduous adulation. But as soon as his faith in their existence and power begins to break down, he puts up with the loss of their godhead, so far as they themselves are concerned, without one qualm of disappointment or inconvenience. It is something far other than that that touches him in religion: it is his hopes for his own eternal welfare, and the welfare after death of those that love him.
Hence, a decline of faith in the great gods is immediately followed by a recrudescence of the most barbaric and original element in religion—the cult of the ghost or spirit, necromancy, the direct worship of the dead or intercourse with the dead: a habit of enquiry into the positive chances of human immortality. This necromantic spirit is well marked in Gnostic remains, and in the fragmentary magical literature of the decadent Græco-Roman world. It is precisely the same tendency which produces spiritualism in our own time: and it is due to the desire to find some new and experimental basis for the common human belief in the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body.
And here we get the clue to the serious change which Christianity wrought in the religious feeling of the western world: a change whose importance and whose retrograde nature has never yet, I believe, been fully recognised. For Christianity, while from one point of view, as a monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic religion, an immense advance upon the aesthetic paganism of Greece and Italy, was from another point of view, as a religion of resurrection rather than a religion of immortality, a step backward for all Western Europe.
Even among the Jews themselves, however, the new cult must have come with all the force of an “aid to faith” in a sceptical generation. Abroad, among the Jewish Hellenists, Greek philosophy must have undermined much of the fanatical and patriotic enthusiasm for Jahweh which had grown stronger and ever stronger in Judæa itself through the days of the Maccabees and the Asmonæan princes. Scraps of vague Platonic theorising on the nature of the Divine were taking among these exiles the place of the firm old dogmatic belief in the Rock of Israel. At home, the Hellenising tendencies of the house of Herod, and the importance in Jerusalem of the Sadducees “who say there is no resurrection,” were striking at the very roots of the hope and faith that pious Jews most tenderly cherished. Instead of Israel converting the world, the world seemed likely to convert Israel. Swamped in the great absorbing and assimilating empire, Judah might follow in the way of Ephraim. And Israel’s work in the world might thus be undone, or rather stultified for ever.
Just at this very moment, when all faiths were tottering visibly to their fall, a tiny band of obscure Galilæan peasants, who perhaps had followed a wild local enthusiast from their native hills up to turbulent Jerusalem, may have been seized with a delusion neither unnatural nor unaccustomed under their peculiar circumstances; but which nevertheless has sufficed to turn or at least to modify profoundly the entire subsequent course of the world’s history. Their leader, if we may trust the universal tradition of the sect, as laid down long after in their legendary Gospels, was crucified at Jerusalem under C. Pontius Pilatus. If any fact upon earth about Jesus is true, besides the fact of his residence at Nazareth, it is this fact of the crucifixion, which derives verisimilitude from being always closely connected with the name of that particular Roman official. But three days after, says the legend, the body of Jesus could not be found in the sepulchre where his friends had laid him: and a rumour gradually’ gained ground that he had risen from the dead, and had been seen abroad by the women who mourned him and by various of his disciples. In short, what was universally believed about all other and elder human gods, was specifically asserted afresh in a newer case about the man Christ Jesus. The idea fitted in with the needs of the time, and the doctrine of the Resurrection of Jesus the Christ became the corner-stone of the new-born Christian religion.
Nothing can be clearer than the fact admitted on all hands, that this event formed the central point of the Apostles’ preaching. It was the Resurrection of Jesus, regarded as an earnest of general resurrection for all his followers, that they most insisted upon in their words and writings. It was the resurrection that converted the world of western Europe. “Your faith is flagging,” said the early Christians in effect to their pagan fellows: “your gods are half-dead; your ideas about your own future, and the present state of your departed friends, are most vague and shadowy. In opposition to all this, we offer you a sure and certain hope; we tell you a tale of real life, and recent; we preach a god of the familiar pattern, yet very close to you; we present you with a specimen of actual resurrection. We bring you good tidings of Jesus as the Messiah, and him crucified: to the Jews, a stumbling-block; to the Greeks, foolishness; but to such as are saved, a plain evidence of the power of the God of Israel. Accept our word: let your dead sleep in Christ in our catacombs, as once they slept in Osiris at Abydos, or rested upon him that rests at Philæ.” “If Christ be not risen,” says one of the earliest Christian writers in a passionate peroration, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is vain also: but as it is, Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the first fruits of them that slept.” “Else what shall they do,” he goes on, touching to the quick that ingrained human desire for communion with the departed, “what shall they do which are baptised for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptised for the dead?” These, in short, apart from the elements common to all creeds, are the three great motors of primitive Christianity: one dogmatic, the resurrection of Jesus: one selfish, the salvation of the individual soul: one altruistic, the desire for reunion with the dead among one’s beloved.
Syria and Egypt could easily accept the new doctrine. It involved for them no serious change of front, no wide departure from the ideas and ceremonies which always formed their rounded concept of human existence. There is a representation of the resurrection of Osiris in the little temple on the roof at Denderah which might almost pass for a Christian illustration of the resurrection of Jesus. To Syrian and Egyptian, the resurrection indeed was but a special modern instance of a well-known fact; a fresh basis of evidence upon which to plant firmly the tottering edifice of their old convictions.’ In its beginnings, in short, Christianity was essentially an oriental religion; it spread fastest in the eastern Mediterranean basin, where Judaism was already well established: at Rome, it seems to have attracted chiefly the oriental population. And it is a significant fact that its official adoption as the public religion of the Roman state was the act of the same prince who deliberately shifted the seat of his government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, and largely transformed the character of the empire from a Latin to a Græco-Asiatic type. All the new religions which struggled together for the mastery of the world were oriental in origin: the triumph of Christianity was but a single episode in the general triumph of aggressive orientalism over the occidental element in the Roman system.
Egypt in particular, I believe, had far more to do with the dogmatic shaping of early Christianity, and the settlement of Christian symbolism and Christian mysticism, than is generally admitted by the official historians of the primitive church. There, where the idea of resurrection was already so universal, and where every man desired to be “justified by Osiris,” Christianity soon made an easy conquest of a people on whose faith it exerted so little change. And Egypt easily made its influence felt on the plastic young creed. It is allowed that the doctrine of the Trinity took shape among the Triad-worshippers on the banks of the Nile, and that the scarcely less important doctrine of the Logos was borrowed from the philosophy of Alexandrian Jews. Nobody can look at the figures of Isis and the infant Horus in any Egyptian museum without being at once struck by the obvious foreshadowing of the Coptic and Byzantine Madonna and Child. The mystery that sprang up about the new doctrines; the strange syncretic union of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost into a single Trinity; the miraculous conception by the Theotokos or mother of God—a clear variant in one aspect on the older idea of Hathor; and the antenatal existence of Christ in heaven before his incarnation; all are thoroughly Egyptian in character, with a faint superadded dash of Alexandrian Jewish Hellenism. The love of symbols which the young church so early exhibits in the catacombs and elsewhere smacks equally of Ptolemaic reminiscences of Thebes and Memphis. The mummy-form of Lazarus; the fish that makes such a clever alphabetic ideogram for the name and titles of Jesus; the dove that symbolises the Holy Ghost; the animal types of the four evangelists—all these are in large part Egyptian echoes, resonant of the same spirit which produced the hieroglyphics and the symbolism of the great Nilotic temples. At the same time it must be remembered that sacred fish were common in Syria, and that similar identifications of gods with animals have met us at every turn, in our earlier investigation.
Nay, more, the very details themselves of Christian symbolism often go back to early Egyptian models. The central Christian emblem of all, the cross, is holy all the world over: it is the sacred tree: and each race has adapted it to its own preconceived ideas and symbols. But in Coptic Christianity it has obvious affinities with the crux ansata. In the Coptic room of the New Museum at Ghizeh is an early Christian monument with a Greek uncial inscription, on which is represented a cross of four equal limbs with expanded flanges, having a crux ansata inserted in all its four interstices. At the Coptic church of Abu Sirgeh at Old Cairo occurs a similar cross, also with suggestions of Tau-like origin, but with other equal-limbed crosses substituted for the cruces ansatae in the corners. * How far the Egyptian Christians thus merely transferred their old ideas to the new faith may be gathered from a single curious example. In Mr. Loftie’s collection of sacred beetles is a scarabæus containing a representation of the crucifixion, with two palm branches: and other scarabs have Christian crosses, “some of them,” says Mr. Loftie, “very unmistakable.” If we remember how extremely sacred the scarab was held in the Egyptian religion, and also that it was regarded as the symbol of the resurrection, we cannot possibly miss the importance of this implication. Indeed, the Alexandrian Father, Epiphanius, speaks of Christ as “the scarabæus of God,” a phrase which may be still better understood if I add that in the treatise on hieroglyphs known under the name of Horapollo a scarabæus is said to denote “an only-begotten.” Thus “the lamb of God” in the tongue of Israel becomes “the scarabæus of God” in the mouth of an Egyptian speaker. To put it shortly, I believe we may say with truth, in a sense far other than that intended by either prophet or evangelist, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
* Count Goblet d’Alviella’s interesting work on The
Migration of Symbols well illustrates this common syncretism
and interchangeability of symbolic signs, which runs
parallel with the syncretism of gods and religions.