§ 1. Growth of Idolatry and Polytheism
By the seventh century all that idolatry had meant for the early Christists was reproduced within the Christian Church in East and West. There was nothing, to begin with, in the inner life of the populace in the Christian period that could keep them from the kinds of belief natural to the multitude in pagan times. Only under the stress of a zealous movement of reform, backed up by fanatical power, had image-worship ever been put down for a single nation, as among the Persians and later Jews; and only the original Jewish taboo, backed by the Jewish sacred books, could have kept Christism anti-idolatrous for any length of time after it had passed beyond the sphere of Jewish proselytism. After it had become a State religion, the adoption of images was as necessary to its popularity as the adoption of pagan festivals and rites. Images of martyrs and holy men deceased seem to have been first venerated; and when the bones of such were held to have miraculous virtue, and their spirits were believed to haunt their tombs, it was impossible that their effigies should not come to have similar repute. Dust from Palestine or other holy places, again, was early regarded as having magical virtue—a permitted belief which prepared the way for others. So with the figure of the Christ. From the first, the sign of the cross was held to be potent against evil spirits; and Helena, the mother of Constantine, gave an irresistible vogue to the worship of what was alleged to be the true cross, and to have worked miraculous cures. As early as the fourth century the Christians at Paneas in Palestine seem to have taken an old statue of a male and a female figure as representing Jesus healing the believing woman; and in the sixth century paintings on linen, held to have been miraculously made by the face of the Saviour, began to be revered. Being so different from pagan statues, the “idols” of Jewish aversion, they readily passed the barrier of the traditional veto on idolatry. Here again, however, the lead came from paganism, as we know from Juvenal that many painters in his day “lived upon Isis,” then the fashionable foreign deity at Rome. Crucifixes and images of all kinds inevitably followed. Valens and Theodosius passed laws forbidding pictures and icons of Christ; but such laws merely emphasized an irrepressible tendency. As for Mary, her worship seems from the first to have been associated with that of old statues of a nursing Goddess-Mother, and the statues followed the cult, some black statues of Isis and Horus being worshipped to this day as representing Mary and Jesus.
When an image was once set up in a sacred place, there soon came into play the old belief, common to Egyptians and Romans, that the spirit of the being represented would enter the statue. Hence all prayers to saints were addressed wherever possible to their images, and the same usage followed the introduction of images of Jesus and the Virgin. And while the Theodosian code contained laws prohibiting on pain of death the placing of wreaths on pagan statues and the burning of incense before them, the Christian populace within a century was doing those very things to the statues of saints. In the same way the use of holy water, which in the time of Valentinian was still held un-Christian, became universal in the Church a century or two later. Images could not well be left out. The old Judaic conception of the supreme being was indeed too strong to permit of his being imaged; though in the fourth century the Audæans, a Syrian sect of a puritan cast, held that the deity was of human shape, and were accordingly named Anthropomorphites; but the orthodox insistence on the human form of Jesus was a lead to image-making. Thus for the Moslems the eastern Christians were idolaters as well as polytheists; and the epistles of Gregory the Great show him to have zealously fostered the use of miraculous relics and sacred images in the West. Professing to condemn the worship of images, he defended their use against Bishop Selenus of Marseilles, who ejected them from his church. One of Gregory’s specialties in relics was the chain of St. Paul, from which filings could be taken daily without diminishing the total bulk. It was presumably while all pagan usages were still familiar that the Italian Christians adopted the custom of painting the statues of saints red, in the common pagan fashion, as they did the old custom of carrying the images in procession. For the rest, they had but to turn to the lore of the pagan temples for examples of statues brought from heaven, statues which worked miracles, statues which spoke, wept, perspired, and bled—all of which prodigies became canonical in Christian idolatry.
Some scrupulous and educated Christians, such as Epiphanius and Augustine, had naturally set their faces against such a general reversion to practical idolatry, just as many educated pagans had done on philosophical grounds; and the council of Elvira in the fourth century condemned the admission of pictures into churches. But this had no lasting effect. In the eighth century, when it could no longer be pretended that Christian images served merely for edification, the Greek emperor Leo the Isaurian began the famous iconoclastic movement in the East. It is probable that he was influenced by Saracen ideas, with which he often came in contact; though it has been held that his motive was mainly political, the local worship of images having weakened the central authority of the Church. But after some generations of struggle and fluctuation, despite the ready support given to iconoclasm by many bishops, the throne reverted to orthodoxy, and idolatry thenceforth remained normal in the Greek as in the Latin Church. The one variation from pagan practice lay in the substitution of pictures and painted wooden images or icons for the nobler statues of past paganism, with which indeed Christian art could not pretend for a moment to compete.
In the West, though the iconoclastic emperors met from the popes not sympathy but intense hostility, leading soon to the severance of Rome from the empire, we find in the ninth century a remarkable opposition to image-worship on the part of Claudius bishop of Turin, and Agobard bishop of Lyons, both of whom show a surprising degree of rationalism for their age. Claudius opposed papal claims as well as saint-worship and image-worship, and when condemned by a council of bishops called them asses. Agobard opposed all the leading superstitions of his day, even going so far as to pronounce the theory of plenary inspiration an absurdity. As both men were born in Spain, there is reason to suspect that they like Leo had been influenced by the higher Saracen thought of the time. In any case, their stand was vain; and though the northern nations, mainly perhaps by reason of their backwardness in the arts, were slow to follow the Italian lead, a century or two sufficed to make the whole Latin Church devoutly image-worshipping. At no time, of course, had any part of it been otherwise than boundlessly credulous as to miracles of every order, and as to the supernatural virtue of relics of every species; and both, accordingly, abounded on all hands. The average mass of Christendom was thus on the same religious and psychological plane as pagan polytheism.
Polytheistic, strictly speaking, Christianity had been from the first. The formula of the Trinity was no more truly monotheistic for the new faith than it had been for ancient Egypt; and the mere belief in an Evil Power was a negation of monotheism. But when saints came to be prayed-to at separate shrines, and every trade had its saint-patron, the Christian system was both theoretically and practically as polytheistic as that of classic Greece, where Zeus was at least as truly the Supreme God as was the Father for Christians. And in the elevation of Mary to Goddesshood even the formal semblance of monotheism was lost, for her worship was in the main absolute. The worship, indeed, was long established before she received technical divinization from the Church, such Fathers as Epiphanius and Augustine having too flatly condemned her early worship to permit of a formal declaration to the contrary. But in the thirteenth century, St. Bonaventura, who expressly maintained that the same reverence must be paid to the Virgin’s image as to herself—a doctrine established in the same period by Thomas Aquinas in regard to Christ—arranged a Psalter in which domina was substituted for dominus (in te domina speravi); and this became the note of average Catholicism. In the twelfth century began the dispute as to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—the doctrine, that is, of her supernatural birth—on which in later ages the Dominicans and Franciscans fought a bitter and obstinate battle, the latter affirming and the former denying the dogma. After seven centuries of temporizing, the Papacy has in recent times endorsed it (1854); but for a thousand years it has been implicit in the ritual of the Catholic Church.
It is not generally known among Protestants that the deification of Joseph has long been in course of similar evolution. In the fifteenth century, Saint Teresa seems to have regarded him as the “plenipotentiary” of God (= Jesus), obtaining from the deity in heaven whatever he asked, as he had done on earth according to the Apocrypha. The cult has never been very prominent; but the latter-day litany of St. Joseph treats him as at least the equal of the Virgin. “The devotion to him,” says Cardinal Newman, “is comparatively of late date. When once it began, men seemed surprised that it had not been thought of before; and now they hold him next to the Blessed Virgin in their religious affection and veneration.” It had of course been dogmatically retarded by the insistence on the virginity of Mary. But Gerson, one of the most distinguished theologians of the fourteenth century, is credited by modern Catholics with having suggested the recognition of a second or created Trinity of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And seeing that Joseph in the popular medieval representations of the Advent Mystery is a constant figure, it is inferrible that for the multitude he had practically a divine status. The process is strictly in keeping with religious evolution in general; and the official apotheosis of Joseph may one day take place. For a time, in the period of the Renaissance, there was an amount of devotion paid to St. Anna, the mother of Mary, which might conceivably have led to her deification. Pictures of that period may still be seen in Holland, in which Anna, Mary, and Jesus constitute a Holy Family. But the cultus of Anna had no persistent or powerful advocate, and she seems latterly to have passed definitely into the background.