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

by J. M. Robertson

§ 4. Concession and Fixation

It is not to be supposed that any abnormal sagacity presided over the formation of either the creed and canon or the official system of the Church; but insofar as it survived it can be seen to have done so in virtue alike of assimilation and of refusal to assimilate. Much expansion was needed to make an area broad enough for the pagan populace; and on the side of custom and myth hardly any pagan element was ultimately refused. At the outset the great cause of strife between Christian and pagan was the contemptuous refusal of the former to show any respect for “idols”—a principle derived by Jewry from Persia, and passed on to the first Jesuists. When, however, the Christian cult became that of the State, it of necessity reverted, as we shall see, to the psychology of the multitude, and carried the use of images as far as pagans had ever done. Even the so-called “animal-worship” of the Egyptians partly survived in such usages as the presence of the sacred ox and ass in the mystery-play of the Nativity (an immemorial popular rite, belonging to sun-worship), in the adoption of the “four zoa” of the Apocalypse (old Oriental figures) as the symbols of the four evangelists, and in the conception of “the Lamb.” Before the period of image-worship, too, the Church had fully accepted the compromise by which countless pagan “heroes” and “geniuses,” the subjects of local cults, became enrolled as saints and martyrs, whose bones had given to tombs and wells and shrines a sacred virtue, and whose old festival-days became part of the new ecclesiastical calendar.

Above all, there was finally forced on the Church a cult of the Mother as Virgin Goddess, without which it could not have held its own against the great and well-managed worships of Isis and Rhea-Cybelê and Dêmêtêr; since the first and last in particular aroused in multitudes a rapture of exalted devotion such as was not psychologically possible towards even a crucified God, save insofar as the emotion of women worshippers towards the slain Demigod realized that of male devotees towards the Queen of Heaven and the Mother and sustainer of things. If the original Jesus of the myth had not had a mythical mother, it would have been necessary to invent one. Once established, her elevation to the honours of Isis was inevitable.

No less necessary, on the other hand, to the official survival of the new system was a dogmatic limit to new doctrine. Where concrete myth and ritual enlarged the scope of the cult, freedom of abstract speculation dissipated its forces and menaced its very existence. All manner of streams might usefully flow into its current, but when the main river threatened to break up into a hundred searching rivulets there was a prospect of its being wholly lost in the sands. This danger, sometimes charged solely upon the Gnostics, arose with the very first spread of the cult: every Pauline epistle, early or late, exhibited the scope it gave for schism and faction. Mere random “prophesying,” which it was difficult to discountenance, meant endless novelties of doctrine. At every stage at which we can trace it the early Church is divided, be it by Judaism against Gentilism, faith against works, Paul against Apollos, or one Jesus against another: the very nature of the forces which made possible the propaganda involved their frequent clash; and multitudes of converts were doubtless won and lost in the chances of sectarian strife. When to the Jews and proselytes and illiterates of the earlier movement there began to be added speculative Gentile Gnostics, for whom Yahweh was but one of many rival tribal Gods, and Jesus one of many competitive slain Saviours, there came with them a species of heresy which bade fair to lull all schism in a euthanasia of universalism. The theosophies of Egypt and the East were alike drawn upon in the name of Christism, and there resulted endless webs of grandiose mysticism, in which the problem of the Cosmos was verbally solved by schemes of intermediary powers between deity and man, and endless periods of transformation between the first and the last states of matter. In these philosophies Jesus was explained away or allegorized just as were the Gods of paganism, and the motive force of fanatical ill-will against those deities on the score of their characters was lost in a reconciling symbolism. Framed for brooding minds that could not rest in the primitive solutions of the popular cults, such systems on the other hand could never attach or hold the mass of the people; and as they were yet produced on all hands, the Christian organization was soon forced to define its dogma if it would keep any distinguishing faith. Insofar as so-called Gnosticism lent itself obediently to the embellishment of the canonical writings and the confutation of the heathen—as in the works of Clement of Alexandria—it was accepted without much demur; but all new or independent theory was tabooed. Speculative minds were dangerous things in a church aiming at practical success; and they were assiduously barred out.

The conservative process, of which we shall trace the history, was carried on partly by documentary forgeries, partly by more honest polemic, partly by administrative action and the voting of creeds. But in the nature of the case the forgeries, where successful, were the most central and decisive forces; and we may still see, in the schematic narratives of the Acts of the Apostles, in the interpolations of the Apocalypse, in some of the readjustments of the gospel text, and in the more obviously spurious Pauline epistles, how faction and fanaticism were fought with intelligent fraud; and how a troublesome popular delusion was guarded against by creating another that lent itself to official ends. The “true” creed is just the creed which was able to survive.

§ 5. Cosmic Philosophy

As we have seen, Gentile philosophy did actually enter into the sacred books of the new faith, notably in the doctrine of the Logos or “Word,” which in the fourth gospel virtually reshapes the entire Jesuist system. That gospel, rather than the preaching of Paul, is the doctrinal foundation of Gentile Christianity. In the synoptics the founder broadly figures as a Judaic Messiah, who is shortly to come again, at the world’s end, to judge the quick and the dead; and only for a community convinced of the speedy approach of doomsday could such a religion suffice. In the Pauline as in the other epistles we see the belief in full play; and only in one of the later forgeries ([2 Thess. ii]) is a caveat inserted. When the period loosely specified for the catastrophe was clearly passed, and the Church had become an economic institution like another, it must needs present a religion for a permanent world if it was to hold its own; and while the changing speculations of the Gnostics had to be vetoed in the interests of solidarity, some scheme of philosophic dogma was needed which, like theirs, should envisage the world as an enduring process. Pauline polemic did but claim for believing Gentiles a part in the Jewish salvation, and such a view had been reached by Philo before Paul. The fourth gospel, substituting the Christ-sacrifice for the Jewish Passover, and putting a world-Logos in place of a descendant of David, gave the theoretic basis of a permanent cosmopolitan cult analogous to those of Egypt and Persia. The invention of a gentilizing history of the first apostles was a part of the same process of adaptation; but the fourth gospel supplied the religion for the Church which the official adaptors sought to develop.

Such an evolution was psychologically prepared for by the whole drift of latter-day Jewish thought outside of Judea. The idea of “the Word” of the deity as an entity, capable of personification, had long belonged to Jewish theology in terms of many passages in the Old Testament, and is but one variant of the psychological process by which Brahmans came to conceive of the Vedas, and Moslems of the Koran, as eternal existences. The Chaldaic word Memra had already much of the mystic significance of Logos, which meant both “word” and “reason”; the books of Proverbs, Job, and the Wisdom of Solomon had made familiar the conception of a personified divine Wisdom, dwelling beside the deity; and the Alexandrian Jew Philo had made the Logos a central figure in his theosophy. But in the theosophies of Egypt and Persia the same conception had long been established; Plato had made it current in the theosophy of the Greeks, combining it with a mystic doctrine of the cross; and Thoth and Hermes and Mithra were already known as the Logos to their worshippers. Thus, whether the fourth gospel were framed at Ephesus or at Alexandria, by a cosmopolitan Jew or by a Gentile proselyte, it had grounds of appeal to every Christist save the original Judaic Jesuists, whose monopoly it was framed to overthrow. It of course gave no coherent philosophy of the universe, and merely evaded the problem of evil, which the Gnostics were constantly seeking to solve; but it was none the worse a religious document for that.