A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

[13] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. II, ch. ii, §§ 2–3. [↑]

Chapter II

THE ENVIRONMENT

The artificial organism which we have seen beginning to take shape is to be conceived, like organisms properly so called, as depending on and adjusting itself to its environment. Of this the nature has been partly set forth in tracing the beginnings of the cult, but it must be considered in itself if the relation is to be at all fully understood.

§ 1. Social and Mental Conditions in the Roman Empire

The world in which Christianity grew up was above all things one of extinguished nationalities, of obliterated democracies, of decaying intellectual energy. Wherever the Roman Empire spread, a rigid limit was set to the play of public spirit, whether as criticism of the political order or as effort to improve the social structure. The forms of municipal government remained; but the natural and progressive struggle of classes and interests was at an end. The Jew must give up his polity of applied theocracy; the Greek his ideal of the City State; even as the Roman Senate itself shrank into an assembly of sycophants, content to register its master’s decrees. All alike, on pain of extinction, must mutely or fawningly accept the imperial system, and abandon hope of shaping their own political destinies. In such a world the thinking faculty, denied almost all exercise on the living problems of polity and conduct, necessarily turned to the themes that were open to it; and as the very calibre of men’s minds had narrowed with the suppression of their freedom, which meant the curtailment of their personality, there was no such general faculty available as could grasp the difficult problems of science and philosophy led up to by the hardy speculation of the ages of freedom and by the skilled specialism of the endowed students of pre-Roman Alexandria. For the mass of the people, above all, save where the Greek drama was still presented to them, concrete religion was the one possible form of mental life; and for the more serious such mental life was at once a solace and a preoccupation. Under a despotism which in so many ways conformed to oriental types, serious men developed something of the oriental aloofness from the actual: from action they turned to brooding; from seen interests to the problems of the unseen. Even in Rome itself, where the upper classes were much more indifferent to Christism than those of the Eastern provinces, the new conditions developed a new interest in theological problems on the pagan side.

Broadly speaking, types and classes of men have always been meditatively religious or reflective in the degree of their exclusion from practical concerns. In the ancient world the law reveals itself at every vista. At one extreme stood the energetic Romans, sedulous first in agriculture and later in warfare; superstitious but unspeculative; making ritual religion a methodical province of polity, a part of the mechanism of the republic: at the other the Hindus, predestined to despotism by their physical and economic conditions, and to inaction by their climate, the true children of reverie, for whom religious evolution was a deepening absorption in boundless speculation. Midway stood the Greeks, active but not laborious, too alive for much brooding and too cultured for wholly pedantic superstition, the natural framers of a religion of poetry and art. Their science and philosophy began in Asia Minor, on the soil of the half-scientific, half-religious lore of the overthrown Assyrian and Babylonian cultures of the past, in a leisurely and half-oriental atmosphere; and after the first free evolution of its germs in the manifold life of their countless competitive City States, the most notable growth of their philosophy was in the period when their political failure began to declare itself, and the shadow of despotism was falling on men sobered and chagrined by the spectacle of ceaseless intestine strife. When despotism was fixed, thought still progressed for a time in virtue of the acquired stores of culture and stress of impulse; but in that air the higher life soon flagged, and philosophy for the most part lapsed to the levels of ancient mysticism, becoming a play of fantasy instead of an effort of critical reason.

When the cultured few underwent such a destiny, the uncultured crowd could but feed on the simpler religious doctrine that came in their way. It necessarily ran to a more intimate employment of the standing machinery of the creeds, to a use of the more emotional rites, to a freer participation in the consolations and excitements of the dramatic mysteries. Where civic life was precarious without being self-ruling, the more serious came more and more under the sway of the oriental preoccupation over the future—a habit of mind developed in lands subject to chronic conquest and to the caprice of tyrants and satraps. Growing Greece, while free, had taken from the East, centuries before the Christian era, stimulating and emotional cults, especially dear to women, with mysteries which promised to their initiates a blessed life beyond the troublous present; and by a natural tendency those who had least share in controlling the present clung most to such comfort. So, in republican Rome, it was found that the women and the imported slaves were always most hospitable to a new “superstition”; and in times of dangerous war the proclivity quickened.