The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus

by John Stuart Hay

Little, when the young Emperor undertook the task of unifying churches, could he have imagined the magnitude of the task, or the reason of the opposition. As we have said, this opposition came from the fact that an entirely different system of religion held sway. To-day we would call the Roman system natural religion and Antonine’s conception dogmatic truth. He ascribed too much to his God, which is no uncommon failing amongst the credulous; probably he claimed a revelation from on high, and was inclined to consign those who disagreed with him to that special limbo which the ignorant have reserved for all those who make them look foolish, for all that spells truth contrary to their own limited imaginings; if so, he would not have been unusual. The genius of natural religion is that it is comprehensive, tolerant, righteous and just. It has no dogma save the individual experience of each. The genius of dogmatic religion lies in the assumption to itself of absolute exclusiveness; it alone contains truth, and in its later editions, finality as well. Whether Antonine’s form included this latter pretension we do not know, certainly it claimed what no Roman thinker could accord to any faith under the sun—the proposition that God was one and God was supreme. The Roman had been bred on Pyrrho, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Cicero, and was more inclined to postulate that God was the cosmic entity of spirit, something as potent as, if not analogous to, the entity of electricity in modern science. He had no relations with the older deities who had made life terrible by their persecutions of the human race, and had no desire to submit himself again to a system which would erect fright into yet another national deity. He had long since grown weary of trying to propitiate infinity, and now understood that he might as well sacrifice to the animals in the Zoological Gardens, in the hope of staying their hunger, as make oblation to the deities in the expectation of a return in kind.

This was no new struggle that Antonine proposed to inaugurate in the city of Rome. It is the contest between rationalism and dogma when pushed to its logical conclusion. Doubtless there is much to be said on both sides; certainly much has been written and more has been said during the history of civilisation. The rationalists have set it forth as the struggle between ignorance and reason; the dogmatists as that between good and evil; certainly it was not a struggle on which Antonine was either old enough or wise enough to lay down any definite line of truth for the future guidance of the world. Unfortunately, this was just what he attempted to do. He knew that the national deity of every nation under heaven was fright, and forgot that its antithesis was truth. He knew that fright was bound to predominate; that men would continue to pay their worship as they paid their taxes, lest a worse thing should happen to them. It had been the same in Homer’s day. Men had been brought up to fright, and as one God died they demanded another. The Prophets had given men Gods, laughing the while at the divinities they created, because they believed as little in the sacerdotal fables as Tennyson did in the phantom idylls of Arthurian romance.

The point is, that what the mass of men demand they will get. It is the usual law of supply and demand, where the man who can increase the demand and satisfy it to any extent is the successful founder of a new religion. This is undoubtedly the business of the sacerdotal caste in every generation, and their success is assured as long as they are capable of increasing the supply, while they whet the demand. They fail when some one else appeals to popular imagination as more mysterious, or more spiritual.

Now, Antonine seemed to think that mere dictation of what was to himself obvious should be enough to give his God a start, and, that done, all men would discover the vital attraction for themselves. Perhaps he was right; stranger things had happened before his day, and were to happen not long afterwards; we can never know, as the system had no more time for a fair trial than had that of Constantine’s successor Julian.

For the moment Rome was bored with all Gods; they had found them so cruel, vindictive, and malignant that the citizens had got irritated and sceptical, had left their deities feeling that already for too long time had blood and treasure been spent without avail. Now at last, men said, “dread has vanished and in its place is the ideal.” Evemerus had asserted that the Gods were just ordinary bullies who would cringe if men stood up to them, and even the lower classes had agreed with him.

This, Antonine felt, was a deplorable state of affairs—rank atheism if not something worse. He knew the potency of his God, and desired, by gentle means, to set it forth to others that they too might believe. Unfortunately, no one desired belief, and he had to fight against rationalism as well as convention. The Romans were not yet tired of their chase after impossible delights; when they were, another dogma presented itself, and as often as not it was accepted, as being the line of least resistance.

If Antonine had given them what Julian did, his success would have been assured. Such was philosophy, freedom, and beauty under the guise of a God whose existence he admitted, but whose intervention he denied. Antonine was not Julian; he was an Eastern monotheist, far nearer to the worship and doctrines of Jehovah than to those of any Western mode of thought. He could not understand the deification of attributes, because he wanted something more tangible, real, and superstitious, something that appealed to his neurotic nature and erotic passions.

Thus it is that his vain efforts to unite all worship, all religions in that dedicated to Deus Solus are derided, as well by the monotheistic Hebrew as by the tritheistic Christian. His fault lay in the fact that he was too young for the work, too unaccustomed to the circuitous and mole-like burrowings by which a religion captures society. But the scheme in itself showed purpose and a precocious propensity for the mysterious, unnatural and unhealthy in a child of his age.

Had Antonine been born in the twentieth instead of the third century of this era, had he enjoyed the advantages of a modern education, he would have learned that religion and unusual propensities are the last things a gentleman is expected to parade before the world. Further, he would have certainly emerged from the training—which though drastic is certainly most salutary—with his waywardness curbed, his mind and will strengthened, his lithe and graceful body healthy and fit to bear the fatigues and responsibilities which life was going to lay upon his splendid shoulders. Unfortunately for him, he was a Syrian with wonderful eyes and a mystical temperament, and was born at a time when the monarch’s wayward will was a law unto himself and all the world besides; yet despite these drawbacks, with so many of the elements of success to hand, he might have triumphed, if the usual conspirators had not been at work. “Rome was still mistress of the world though she was growing very old. A few more years and the Earth’s new children fell upon her; then the universe was startled by the uproar of her agony. Then and not till then, where the thunderbolt had gleamed did the emaciated figure of the crucifix appear, and upon the shoulders of a prelate descended the purple which had dazzled the world.”