In the west, however, the results of the spread of Christianity were far more revolutionary. Indeed, I do not think the cult of Jesus could ever have spread at all in Rome had it not been for the large extent to which the city was peopled in later times by Syrians and Africans. And if Christianity had not spread in Rome, it could never have gained a foothold at all in the Aryan world: for it is not at bottom an Aryan religion in tone and feeling: it has only become possible among Aryan peoples by undergoing at last a considerable change of spirit, though not largely of form, in its westward progress. This change is indicated by the first great schism, which severed the Latin from the Greek communion.
Foremost among the changes which Christianity involved in Italy and the rest of western Europe was the retrograde change from the belief in immortality and the immateriality of the soul, with cremation as its practical outcome, to the belief in the resurrection of the body, with a return to the disused and discredited practice of burial as its normal correlative. The catacombs were the necessary result of this backward movement; and with the catacombs came in the possibility of relic-worship, martyr-worship, and the adoration of saints and their corpses. I shall trace out in my next chapter the remoter effects of this curious revival of the prime element in religion—the cult of the dead—in greater detail: it must suffice here to point out briefly that it resulted as a logical effect from the belief in the resurrection of Christ, and the consequent restoration of the practice of burial. Moreover, to polytheists, this habit gave a practical opening for the cult of many deities in the midst of nominal monotheism, which the Italians and sundry other essentially polytheistic peoples were not slow to seize upon. Here again the difference between the more monotheistic and syncretic east, which puts a ban upon graven images, and the more polytheistic and separating west, which freely admits the employment of sculpture, is not a little significant. It is true that theoretically the adoration paid to saints and martyrs is never regarded as real worship: but I need hardly say that technical distinctions like these are always a mere part of the artificial theology of scholastic priesthoods, and may be as safely disregarded by the broad anthropological enquirer as may all the other fanciful lumber of metaphysical Brahmans and theologians everywhere. The genuine facts of religion are the facts and rites of the popular cult, which remain in each race for long periods together essentially uniform.
Thus we early get two main forms of Christianity, both official and popular: one eastern—Greek, Coptic, Syrian; more mystical in type, more symbolic, more philosophic, more monotheistic: the other western—Latin, Celtic, Spanish; more Aryan in type, more practical, more material, more polytheistic. And these at a later time are reinforced by a third or northern form,—the Teutonic and Protestant; in which ethical ideas preponderate over religious, and the worship of the Book in its most literal and often foolish interpretation supersedes the earlier worship of Madonna, saints, pictures, statues, and emblems.
At the period when Christianity first begins to emerge from the primitive obscurity of its formative nisus, however, we find it practically compounded of the following elements—which represent the common union of a younger god offered up to an older one with whom he is identified.
First of all, as the implied basis, taken for granted in all the early Hebrew scriptures, there is current Judaism, in the form that Judaism had gradually assumed in the fourth, third, and second centuries before the Christian era. This includes as its main principle the cult of the one god Jahweh, now no longer largely thought of under that personal name, or as a strictly ethnic deity, but rather envisaged as the Lord God who dwells in heaven, very much as Christians of to-day still envisage him. It includes also an undercurrent of belief in a heavenly hierarchy of angels and archangels, the court of the Lord (modifications of an earlier astrological conception, the Host of Heaven), and in a principle of evil, Satan or the devil, dwelling in hell, and similarly surrounded by a crowd of minor or assistant demons. Further, it accepts implicitly from earlier Judaism the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of the good and the wicked, the doctrine of future rewards and punishments (perhaps in its fullest shape a Hellenistic importation from Egypt, though also commonly found in most spontaneous religions), and many other tenets of the current Jewish belief. In short, the very earliest Christians, being probably for the most part Jews, Galilæans, and proselytes, or else Syrians and Africans of Judaising tendencies, did not attempt to get rid of all their preconceived religious opinions when they became Christians, but merely superadded to these as a new item the special cult of the deified Jesus.
On the other hand, as the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, it was not thought necessary to burden the fresh converts with the whole minute ceremonial of Judaism, and especially with the difficult and unpleasant initiatory rite of circumcision. A mere symbolical lustration, known as baptism, was all that was demanded of new adherents to the faith, with abstinence from any participation in “heathen” sacrifices or functions. To this extent the old exclusiveness of Jahweh-worship, the cult of the jealous God, was still allowed to assert itself. And the general authority of the Hebrew scriptures, especially as a historical account of the development of Judaism, from which Christianity sprang, was more or less fully admitted, at first by implication or quotation alone, but afterwards by the deliberate and avowed voice of the whole Christian assembly. The translation of this mixed mass of historical documents, early cosmogonies, ill-reported and Jeho-vised Jewish traditions, misinterpreted poems, and conscious forgeries, in the Latin version known as the Vulgate, had the effect of endowing Europe for many centuries with a false body of ancient history, which must have largely retarded the development of the race up to our own time, and whose evil effects have hardly yet passed away among the more ignorant and conservative Bibliolatrous classes of modern society.
Superimposed upon this substratum of current Judaism with its worship of Jahweh came the distinctive Jesus-cult, the worship of the particular dead Galilæan peasant. This element was superadded to the cult of the Father, the great god who had slowly and imperceptibly developed out of the sacred stone that the sons of Israel were believed to have brought up with them from the land of Egypt. But how, in a religion pretending to be monotheistic, were these two distinct cults of two such diverse gods to be reconciled or to be explained away? By the familiar doctrine of the incarnation, and the belief in the human god who is sacrificed, himself to himself, as a piacular offering. Jewish tradition and subtler Egyptian mysticism sufficed to smooth over the apparent anomaly. The Jews looked forward to a mysterious deliverer, a new Moses, the Messiah, who was to fulfil the destiny of Israel by uniting all nations under the sceptre of David, and by bringing the Gentiles to the feet of the God of Israel. Jesus, said the Christians, had proclaimed himself that very Messiah, the Christ of God; he had often alluded to the great Hebrew deity as his father; he had laid claim to the worship of the Lord of heaven. Further than this, perhaps, the unaided Jewish intelligence would hardly have gone: it would have been satisfied with assigning to the slain man-god Jesus a secondary place, as the only begotten Son of God, who gave himself up as a willing victim—a position perhaps scarcely more important than that which Mohammad holds in the system of Islam. Such, it seems to me, is on the whole the conception which permeates the synoptic Gospels, representing the ideas of Syrian Christendom. But here the acute Græco-Egyptian mind came in with its nice distinctions and its mystical identifications. There was but one god, indeed; yet that god was at least twofold (to go no further for the present). He had two persons, the Father and the Son: and the Second Person, identified with the Alexandrian conception of the Logos, though inferior to the Father as touching his manhood, was equal to the Father as touching his godhead—after the precise fashion we saw so common in describing the relations of Osiris and Horus, and the identification of the Attis or Adonis victim with the earlier and older god he represented. “I and my Father are one,” says the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, the embodiment and incarnation of the Alexandrian Logos. And in the very forefront of that manifesto of Neo-Platonic Christianity comes the dogmatic assertion, “In the beginning was the Logos: and the Logos dwelt with God: and the Logos was God.”
Even so the basis of the new creed is still incomplete. The Father and Son give the whole of the compound deity as the popular mind, everywhere and always, has commonly apprehended it. But the scholastic and theological intelligence needed a Third Person to complete the Trinity which to all mankind, as especially to orientals, is the only perfect and thoroughly rounded figure. In later days, no doubt, the Madonna would have been chosen to fill up the blank, and, on the analogy of Isis, would have filled it most efficiently. As a matter of fact, in the creed of Christendom as the Catholic people know it, the Madonna is really one of the most important personages. But in those early formative times, the cult of the Theotokos had hardly yet assumed its full importance: perhaps, indeed, the Jewish believers would have been shocked at the bare notion of the worship of a woman, the readmission of an Astarte, a Queen of Heaven, into the faith of Israel. Another object of adoration had therefore to be found. It was discovered in that vague essence, the Holy Ghost, or Divine Wisdom, whose gradual development and dissociation from God himself is one of the most curious chapters in all the history of artificial god-making. The “spirit of Jahweh” had frequently been mentioned in Hebrew writings; and with so invisible and unapproachable a deity as the Jewish God, was often made to do duty as a messenger or intermediary where the personal presence of Jahweh himself would have been felt to contravene the first necessities of incorporeal divinity. It was the “spirit of Jahweh” that came upon the prophets: it was the “wisdom of Jahweh” that the poets described, and that grew at last to be detached from the personality of God, and alluded to almost as a living individual. In the early church, this “spirit of God,” this “holy spirit,” was supposed to be poured forth upon the heads of believers: it descended upon Jesus himself in the visible form of a dove from heaven, and upon the disciples at Pentecost as tongues of fire. Gradually, the conception of a personal Holy Ghost took form and definiteness: an Alexandrian monk insisted on the necessity for a Triad of gods who were yet one God: and by the time the first creeds of the nascent church were committed to writing, the Spirit had come to rank with the Father and the Son as the Third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity.
By this time, too, it is pretty clear that the original manhood of Jesus had got merged in the idea of his eternal godhead; he was regarded as the Logos, come down from heaven, where he had existed before all worlds, and incarnate by the Holy Ghost in the Virgin Mary. The other articles of the Christian faith clustered gradually round these prime elements: the myth gathered force; the mysticism increased; the secondary divine beings or saints grew vastly in numbers; and the element of Judaism disappeared piecemeal, while a new polytheism and a new sacerdotalism took root apace in the Aryan world. I shall strive to show, however, in my concluding chapters, how even to the very end the worship of the dead is still the central force in modern Christianity: how religion, whatever its form, can never wander far from that fundamental reality: and how, whenever by force of circumstances the gods become too remote from human life, so that the doctrine of resurrection or personal immortality is endangered for a time, and reunion with relations in the other world becomes doubtful or insecure, a reaction is sure to set in which takes things back once more to these fundamental concepts, the most persistent and perpetually recurrent element in all religious thinking.