Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
... The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse.—Shelley: A Defence of Poetry.
Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons; while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are only one or two common English words which throw any direct light on this period. Martyr, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the Church, as heresy of the later. The name Constantinople has a double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may be called the starting-point of European history.
For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Kingsley’s Hypatia, while Merejkowski, in his Death of the Gods, has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the inner surface of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our language in the various ways described in [Chapter III] were being built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers, by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular, an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner suggested in the [last chapter] were gradually decanted, either by actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables. Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint. Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’ instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. Thus one word, as is often the case, split up into two, sacrament remaining within the Church to express, among other things, part of the old technical meaning of mystery, while mystery itself, freed from one half of its associations, moved outside and quickly grew wider and vaguer. ‘Passio’, the Latin word for suffering, used in ecclesiastical literature for the death of Jesus on the cross, gradually extended in a similar way the scope of its pregnant new meaning, and we find already in Tertullian a derivative ‘compassio’. From Latin, largely through French, such new meanings found their way into English, and it was these, as we shall see, more than anything else which transformed the country between the Norman Conquest and the fifteenth century into something like the England which we know to-day.
For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on, say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human thought and feeling, such as God and love, life and death, heaven and hell,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. Let us look at a fifteenth-century English carol:
I sing of a maiden
That is makeless;[31]
King of all kings
To her son she ches.[32]
He came al so still