In another question of administration, in the position of women in regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing pre-Christian traditions.[53.1] Their present total exclusion from sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the “priestesses of the Virgin Mary.”[54.1] It is still possible that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.
If we try to give a complete account of any of the important institutions of the churches, infant baptism or the Roman confession for instance, we ought at least, before we can pronounce that any particular one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to survey the religions contiguous to or immediately preceding Christianity. As regards the practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope to show, may be explained as connected with a ritual of purification, its institution cannot at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon in the early Church. A very simple form of it appears to have been known to the Judaic system, and it appears as a formal element in the Babylonian liturgy:[54.2] as a spiritual relief to which a man might voluntarily resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic oracle;[55.1] as part of the cathartic ritual which was preliminary to initiation it was required by the ordinances of the Samothracian Mysteries; and it is in an anecdote concerning these that we meet with the first example of the free Protestant spirit reprobating the practice.[55.2] We may infer that it was uncongenial to the character and alien to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, in the record of whose pagan institutions there is no hint of it, and Alcuin complains of his Goths “that no one of the laity was willing to confess to the priests.”[55.3] It may well have been a spontaneous growth of southern Christianity; but it appears to have arisen first within the early monastic orders,[55.4] and as these in their origin had certain affinities with the non-Christian mystic brotherhoods, where the practice was not unknown, it is possible that in this matter also a pre-Christian tradition was still of some effect. Or, if this is unlikely, we must maintain that like conditions evolve similar products over the whole area with which comparative religion deals; and the most striking resemblance to a Christian confessional is to be observed in the old Mexican ritual, if we can trust Sahagun.[56.1] As regards the other suggested example, we should probably find, if we followed out the history and origin of infant baptism, that the pre-Christian tradition was a strong efficient force in the settlement of the question; there were urgent reasons at least why the rite should soon have come to be maintained by the early Church, for analogous rites whereby the new-born child was consecrated to the divinity were probably part of the hereditary tradition of most of the converted races. We know that many of the Hellenes had been in the habit of passing the infant solemnly round the fire, a purificatory and also consecrating process;[57.1] the northern Teutons sprinkled the infant with water:[57.2] and when Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian tribes were in the habit of plunging the new-born into river-water, to harden the little ones, he is mistaking a religious for a secular practice.[57.3] Looking at the baptism of the adult neophyte, we find interesting resemblances to the ceremonies of the pre-Christian mystic initiations; the idea commonly expressed in these latter, that the catechumen died to his old life and was born again, was eagerly adopted and developed by the later religion, and here as there left its imprint on the ritual: death and rebirth were actually simulated in the mystic service.[57.4]
The affinities between Christian and pagan ritual, in many cases no doubt the result of direct inheritance, demand a more detailed investigation than they have yet received, especially in respect of the festival calendar: even the early writers of the Church were of opinion that the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary in February, was a development of the old Roman Februalia instituted by Numa;[58.1] and such names of Christian saints and bishops as Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the popularity of the Hilaria, the festival of Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much might be still discovered by a minute knowledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined with travel in Mediterranean lands and with personal observation of the ritual of feast- and fast-days in the remoter villages.[58.2]
Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination; and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the King.
More important still for the purposes of the religious comparison is the wide prevalence in the Mediterranean communities of the belief in the death and resurrection of the divinity: and this has been the theme of much recent anthropological investigation.[60.1] This is not the time to examine into its origin and significance or to track out the various phenomena that illustrate and group themselves around it in the Mediterranean cults. I would merely call attention in passing to the fact that the belief existed, and was probably expressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St Paul’s own city of Tarsos,[61.1] and that it was especially strong in the Attis Mysteries of the Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete; we know that these were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our Lenten period and the beginning of Easter, that they were preceded by fasting and began with lamentations, the votaries gathering in sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing, the Hilaria.[62.1] The Christian fathers themselves were struck with the deep resemblance between this and their own mystery, and they were tempted to attribute it to the diabolic spirit of parody. We may take the words of Firmicus Maternus,[62.2] with which he concludes his description of such an Attis Mystery as I have outlined—“truly the devil has Christians of his own”—as the text of a very important chapter in comparative religion. We hear of a Christian convert in Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the Hilaria; and Phrygia, its ancestral home, was one of the earliest strongholds of Christianity. Here at least we may assume that the ancient dogma and ritual of the people was one of the predisposing causes operating in favour of the new.
The comparative student must also give careful consideration to what are called the eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning posthumous happiness, salvation, and damnation, not only of the Judaic, but also of the Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian religions: and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was they that were most widely known in the area of the Greco-Roman world, and modern theory has at times endeavoured to trace back the apocalyptic literature of Christianity to Hellenic sources.[63.1] The investigation would demand a careful study of the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, in both of which we find the pregnant idea that salvation after death depended on a religious act of faith or on a mystic communion with a divinity that might be attained on earth by a sacrament or other liturgical means: and the inquiry will include the question how far in these earlier systems the doctrine of salvation by faith was actually blended with any admixture of the ethical doctrine of salvation by works. And the problem, like many others in the scientific study of religion, will be found to concern philosophic as well as religious history.
The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Mediterranean world have long been recognised as a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative science; and both the lower and the higher anthropology can contribute much that is essential to the full understanding of the evolution of the Christian doctrine concerning the divine sacrifice and the Holy Communion. I need not here enlarge on this subject, even by way of mere illustration, for I have already dealt with it, however inadequately, in a former paper:[65.1] it is an intricate and fascinating theme and invites further research.
But for proving the revival on the new Christian soil of the older pre-Christian religious thought and aspiration, there is no special subject so fruitful as the study of Mariolatry. I have already suggested by way of illustration the possibility of such pagan titles as “Kore-Parthenos,” the “Gods’ mother,” having exercised an abiding influence in exciting and shaping the nascent thought of earlier Christendom; and I affirmed that their prevalence corresponded to a prevailing religious bias which turned the minds of many of the peoples in the old world to cleave affectionately to the mother-goddess or to the divine maid. Apart from mere titles, the student of the latter days of paganism is forced to note at almost every point the deep impress of such ideas and the enthusiasm they evoked. In all the leading Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid held a dominant position, and the Orphic brotherhoods had ranged the Mother by the side of the Son-God and the Father-God; and even in the state-cults of the ancient centres of Hellenic civilisation, the maternal character of the divine power had long been cherished. Finally, the Phrygian religion of the Mother, to which even Mithraism, a pre-eminently masculine or paternal religion, was obliged to accommodate itself, had captured the greater part of the Greco-Roman world; and was certainly very influential in the districts of Asia Minor visited by St Paul and in every one of the cities of the Seven Churches. The sentiment it evoked is expressed by the words of a poet of the Middle Attic comedy: “For those who have true knowledge of things divine, there is nothing greater than the Mother; hence the first man who became civilised founded the shrine of the Mother.”[66.1] This then is a leading factor in the religious psychology of the converted nations with which we must reckon.
We cannot, in accordance with the laws of human nature, suppose that a religious tradition of such hereditary power as this could wholly lose its force under a changed creed. The gaps in the record will probably make it impossible to supply a detailed and geographical statement showing how in the various communities of the ancient cult the personality of the pre-Christian goddess was fused gradually with the ideal image of the Virgin-Mother of Christ. Only a few suggestive facts in the development and organisation of Mariolatry may be mentioned here. The heretic Montanists of Phrygia were charged with deifying the Virgin and believing that one of their leaders was united in a mystic marriage with her, a belief natural to Phrygian paganism; and their founder Montanus is said to have originally been a priest of Cybele.[67.1] The mother of Constantine, the Empress Helena, who is supposed to have been of Bithynian origin, was praised for decking the grotto of Bethlehem with sacred gifts as the shrine of the Virgin;[68.1] it is noteworthy that her earliest recorded chapel should be a grotto or cave; for it was in such underground shrines that the Phrygian Mother was commonly worshipped in her own land. Another striking analogy to the ancient ritual of the mother-goddess is presented by the feast called the κοίμησις and ἀνάληψις τῆς θεοτόκου, first mentioned by Andreas of Crete (circ. 650 A.D.), but probably in existence long before his time: the Mother of God dies and rises again in the Assumption. It would be of special interest if we could discover that this ritual first became canonical in Crete, the home of Andreas; for in Crete as in Cyprus, where the Virgin succeeded to the name of Aphrodite, we have traces of a similar rite in which the goddess Aphrodite was laid out as dead on a bier and was afterwards raised to life.[69.1]
And is it nothing more than a coincidence that in the same city of Ephesus, where during St Paul’s visit the fanatics raised a tumult in behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six centuries later the people with equal ecstasy hailed the decision of the Synod that proclaimed the Virgin-Mother of God (θεοτόκος)? The mention of Ephesus suggests another consideration of the greatest importance for the study of the development and propagation of the Christian dogma concerning the virginity of the Mother of God. The Virgin-birth, an idea which has long been a stumbling-block to science, and which has recently been pronounced by some to be unessential to Christianity, was a dogma that could easily be understood and even eagerly accepted by the converts of Anatolia[69.2] and the Greek world. In Ephesus itself the ancient goddess had been imagined in some sense as a maternal or generative divinity, yet also as a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted partly by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of austerity and chastity was enforced.[70.1] The great Phrygian Mother was herself, according to a native legend, miraculously conceived, and there are grounds for suggesting that she was occasionally regarded as a virgin.[70.2] The evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, and often contradictory, with no power apparently in themselves to develop a fixed dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreasonable to maintain that the Christian doctrines concerning the Virgin-Mother could have been evoked merely by the spontaneous demand of the Anatolian or Greek converts. But we may affirm that when that doctrine was presented to them, their own traditions had prepared their imaginations to receive it as congenial. We meet in the late pagan literature passages in praise of virginity as a divine quality quite as ecstatic and extravagant as many in the Christian fathers.[71.1] Many of the nations had long cherished the ideal of a virgin goddess; most had been devotees of the Divine Mother. The successful propagation of Christianity may have owed much to the means which it possessed for satisfying these two sentiments and for reconciling them in a primary article of faith. Then, we must certainly ascribe the exaltation of Mary in the Church of the first six centuries to the enthusiasm engendered by the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may have contributed much more than we have already noted; and more than one writer has explored the deep indebtedness of the developed Mariolatry to the older figure of Isis.[72.1] The extravagance of an enthusiasm that was rooted in old pagan sentiment occasionally engendered heresies. Besides the records concerning the Montanist, of which the significance has already been noticed, most interesting and valuable for our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius against the heresy of the Collideriani,[72.2] wild women who devoted themselves to the worship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he describes and reprobates: in their processions they appear to have drawn the Virgin round in a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised a sacrament with bread: and he adds that they came from Thrace, the immemorial home of fanatic women and of the goddess “Artemis the Queen,” to whom also offerings of corn were made.[72.3] The procession of a goddess in a car was probably part of an old Thrako-Phrygian ceremonial, and we hear of a sacramental eating of bread in the service of Cybele.