The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to “strange gods.” For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phœnicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods “do not exist” would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for particularly honouring the local gods. This is the meaning of the altars dedicated “to the unknown gods,” such as that which Paul so significantly misunderstood in a Magian monotheistic sense at Athens.[[499]] These were gods not known by name to the Greek but worshipped by the foreigners of the great seaports (Piræus, Corinth or other) and therefore entitled to their due of respect from him. Rome expressed this with Classical clearness in her religious law and in carefully-preserved formulæ like, for example, the generalis invocatio.[[500]] As the universe is the sum of things, and as gods are things, recognition had to be accorded even to those gods with whom the Roman had not yet practically and historically come into relations. He did not know them, or he knew them as the gods of his enemies, but they were gods, for it was impossible for him to conceive the opposite. This is the meaning of the sacral phrase in Livy, VIII, 9, 6: “di quibus est potestas nostrorum hostiumque.” The Roman people admits that the circle of its own gods is only momentarily bounded, and after reciting these by name it ends the prayer thus so as not to infringe the rights of others. According to its sacral law, the annexation of foreign territory involves the transfer to Urbs Roma of all the religious obligations pertaining to this territory and its gods—which of course logically follows from the additive god-feeling of the Classical. Recognition of a deity was very far from being the same as acceptance of the forms of its cult; thus in the Second Punic War the Great Mother of Pessinus[[501]] was received in Rome as the Sibyl commanded, but the priests who had come in with her cult, which was of a highly un-Classical complexion, practised under strict police supervision, and not only Roman citizens but even their slaves were forbidden under penalty to enter this priesthood. The reception of the goddess gave satisfaction to the Classical world-feeling, but the personal performance of her despised ritual would have infringed it. The attitude of the Senate in such cases is unmistakable, though the people, with its ever-increasing admixture of Eastern elements, had a liking for these cults and in Imperial times the army became in virtue of its composition a vehicle (and even the chief vehicle) of the Magian world-feeling.
This makes it the easier to understand how the cult of deified men could become a necessary element in this religious form-world. But here it is necessary to distinguish sharply between Classical phenomena and Oriental phenomena that have a superficial similarity thereto. Roman emperor-worship—i.e., the reverence of the “genius” of the living Princes and that of the dead predecessors as “Divi”—has hitherto been confused with the ceremonial reverence of the Ruler which was customary in Asia Minor (and, above all, in Persia,)[[502]] and also with the later and quite differently meant Caliph-deification which is seen in full process of formation in Diocletian and Constantine. Actually, these are all very unlike things. However intimately these symbolic forms were interfused in the East of the Empire, in Rome itself the Classical type was actualized unequivocally and without adulteration. Long before this certain Greeks (e.g., Sophocles, Lysander and, above all, Alexander) had been not merely hailed as gods by their flatterers but felt as gods in a perfectly definite sense by the people. It is only a step, after all, from the deification of a thing—such as a copse or a well or, in the limit, a statue which represented a god—to the deification of an outstanding man who became first hero and then god. In this case as in the rest, what was reverenced was the perfect shape in which the world-stuff, the un-divine, had actualized itself. In Rome the consul on the day of his triumph wore the armour of Jupiter Capitolinus, and in early days his face and arms were even painted red, in order to enhance his similarity to the terra-cotta statue of the God whose “numen” he for the time being incorporated.
X
In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and mythic form, into the Magian monotheism.[[503]] A new soul had come up, and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they covered other numina.
In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and formable being. In old times, Hermes Propylæus had been worshipped at the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens, while a few yards away, at the point where later the Erechtheum was built, was the cult-site of Hermes as the husband of Aglaure. At the South extremity of the Roman Capitol, close to the sanctuary of Juppiter Feretrius (which contained, not a statue of the god, but a holy stone, silex[[504]]) was that of Juppiter Optimus Maximus, and when Augustus was laying down the huge temple of the latter he was careful to avoid the ground to which the numen of the former adhered.[[505]] But in Early Christian times Juppiter Dolichenus or Sol Invictus[[506]] could be worshipped “wheresoever two or three were gathered together in his name.” All these deities more and more came to be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape. Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the “million-named.” Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality, now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind.
This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East—the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Cælestis[[507]]) honoured by Septimius Severus. The importation of these figures no longer increases as in Classical times the number of concrete gods. On the contrary, they absorb the old gods into themselves, and do so in such a way as to deprive them more and more of picturable shape. Alchemy is replacing statics. Correspondingly, instead of the image we more and more find symbols—e.g., the Bull, the Lamb, the Fish, the Triangle, the Cross—coming to the front. In Constantine’s “in hoc signo vinces” scarcely an echo of the Classical remains. Already there is setting in that aversion to human representation that ended in the Islamic and Byzantine prohibitions of images.
Right down to Trajan—long after the last trait of Apollinian world-feeling had departed from the soil of Greece—the Roman state-worship had strength enough to hold to the Euclidean tendency and to augment its world of deities. The gods of the subject lands and peoples were accorded recognized places of worship, with priesthood and ritual, in Rome, and were themselves associated as perfectly definite individuals with the older gods. But from that point the Magian spirit began to gain ground even here, in spite of an honourable resistance which centred in a few of the very oldest patrician families.[[508]] The god-figures as such, as bodies, vanished from the consciousness of men, to make way for a transcendental god-feeling which no longer depended on sense-evidences; and the usages, festivals and legends melted into one another. When in 217 Caracalla put an end to all sacral-legal distinctions between Roman and foreign deities and Isis, absorbing all older female numina, became actually the first goddess of Rome[[509]] (and thereby the most dangerous opponent of Christianity and the most obnoxious target for the hatred of the Fathers), then Rome became a piece of the East, a religious diocese of Syria. Then the Baals of Doliche, Petra, Palmyra and Edessa began to melt into the monotheism of Sol, who became and remained (till his representative Licinius fell before Constantine) God of the Empire. By now, the question was not between Classical and Magian—Christianity was in so little danger from the old gods that it could offer them a sort of sympathy—but it was, which of the Magian religions should dictate religious form to the world of the Classical Empire? The decline of the old plastic feeling is very clearly discernible in the stages through which Emperor-worship passed—first, the dead emperor taken into the circle of State gods by resolution of the Senate (Divus Julius, 42 B.C.), a priesthood provided for him and his image removed from amongst the ancestor-images that were carried in purely domestic celebrations; then, from Marcus Aurelius, no further consecrations of priests (and, presently, no further building of temples) for the service of deified emperors, for the reason that religious sentiment was now satisfied by a general “templum divorum”; finally, the epithet Divus used simply as a title of members of the Imperial family. This end to the evolution marks the victory of the Magian feeling. It will be found that multiple names in the inscriptions (such as Isis-Magna Mater-Juno-Astarte-Bellona, or Mithras-Sol Invictus-Helios) come to signify titles of one sole existent Godhead.[[510]]
XI
Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one has had anything to say about the species of atheism; or has treated it analytically as an individual and definite phenomenon, positive and necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in time.
Is “Atheism” the a priori constitution of a certain world-consciousness or is it a voluntary self-expression? Is one born with it or converted to it? Does the unconscious feeling that the cosmos has become godless bring in its train the consciousness that it is so, the realization that "Great Pan is dead"? Are there early atheists, for example in the Doric or the Gothic ages? Has this thinker or that been denounced as atheist with injustice as well as with passion? And can there be civilized men who are not wholly or at any rate partially atheist?