It must not be imagined that the majority of Alexandrian citizens were interested in these matters. Israel and Egypt resembled Greece in this, that they had in the first place their inner religious traditions, and in the second their stock of popular myth and legend. And just as, in Athens, the average citizen had accepted the teachings of ordinary Greek mythology, without knowing anything at all about the thoughts of contemporary philosophy, so was it in Alexandria, where the majority lived a life of easy-going frivolity and dissipation, paying to the gods the regular outward observances demanded by the calendar, and otherwise not bothering to think much about them until they were frightened or ill. Throughout the course of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the thoughts which have been, made for them by the few in the past, and the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future.
In Palestine Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance, admitted that their Messiah had now come and gone. Egyptians and followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal life. Thus, those who had not been initiated—the poorer classes, most of the women, and the slaves—had a joyous feeling that at last the Mysteries had been revealed, that “many things which were hid had been made plain”. And some students of Platonic philosophy could admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. For they could see in Christ one who had first taught in a new and simpler way, and had then Himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying to say all their lives—that, in order to achieve immortality, it is necessary to “die” to this world of the senses and the appetites, and that he who thus “dies” is already living in eternity during his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it.” Lastly, followers of Philo and his school saw in the Christ the Logos itself incarnate in human form, the Word made Flesh.
Such were some of the numerous ideas and emotions which had become embedded in the Greek language by the time that, somewhere about a hundred years after His death, the life of Christ was written by the four Evangelists and others. Out of these ideas and emotions arose, in the first place, the dogma and ritual of the Catholic Church, and in the second place a great part of the ordinary thoughts and feelings and impulses of will which flourish in the bosoms of modern Europeans and Americans.
Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly, that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover, in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority.
Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution, gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries, creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine, and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (heresy) is a fair indication of the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and all understanding of its external connections; while their success may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third century, would have incurred serious disabilities.
Consequently it is not surprising if we have found ourselves digging in somewhat unfamiliar places. Later on, the Catholic outlook spanned the whole imagination of the Middle Ages like the vaulted nave of a vast cathedral. By laying bare some of the foundations of that outlook and applying to them a little knowledge of the histories of words and their meanings, we can do something which we could hardly do else but by a long and difficult study of the arcana of the Dark Ages, their Neoplatonism, their monastic traditions, their Schools, and their cults of the Virgin. We can, in some degree, be present with our own imaginations at the building of the cathedral. And this is worth while, not only for its own sake, but because, as that huge edifice slowly ruined, we filched its worn but shapely stones and began to build up with them those bridges of feeling which join us to-day to our husbands and our wives, our children, our lovers, our friends.
CHAPTER VII
DEVOTION
Passion. Lady. Love-longing. Conscience. Inquisition. Authority. Individual. Influence.