Any one who turns from the great writers of classical Athens, say Sophocles or Aristotle, to those of the Christian era must be conscious of a great difference in tone. There is a change in the whole relation of the writer to the world about him. The new quality is not specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God. It is an atmosphere in which the aim of the good man is not so much to live justly, to help the society to which he belongs and enjoy the esteem of his fellow creatures; but rather, by means of a burning faith, by contempt for the world and its standards, by ecstasy, suffering, and martyrdom, to be granted pardon for his unspeakable unworthiness, his immeasurable sins. There is an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions; an increase of sensitiveness, a failure of nerve.
Now this antithesis is often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if p. 124 St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact. The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first of these essays.
My description of this complicated change is, of course, inadequate, but not, I hope, one-sided. I do not depreciate the religions that followed on this movement by describing the movement itself as a 'failure of nerve'. Mankind has not yet decided which of two opposite methods leads to the fuller and deeper knowledge of the world: the patient and sympathetic study of the good citizen who lives in it, or the ecstatic vision of the saint who rejects it. But probably most Christians are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure, without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain the religious life. I can imagine an historian of this temper believing that the period we are about to discuss was a necessary softening of human pride, a Praeparatio Evangelica.124_1
I am concerned in this paper with the lower country lying between two great ranges. The one range is Greek Philosophy, culminating in Plato, Aristotle, the Porch, and the Garden; the other is Christianity, culminating in St. Paul and his successors. The one is the work of Hellas, using some few foreign elements; the second is the work of Hellenistic culture on a Hebrew stock. The books of Christianity are Greek, the philosophical background is Hellenistic, the result of the interplay, in the free atmosphere of Greek philosophy, of religious ideas derived from Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. The preaching is carried on in Greek among the Greek-speaking workmen of the great manufacturing and commercial cities. The first preachers are Jews: the central scene is set in Jerusalem. I wish in this essay to indicate how a period of religious history, which seems broken, is really continuous, and to trace the lie of the main valleys which lead from the one range to the other, through a large and imperfectly explored territory.
The territory in question is the so-called Hellenistic Age, the period during which the Schools of Greece were 'hellenizing' the world. It is a time of great p. 126 enlightenment, of vigorous propaganda, of high importance to history. It is a time full of great names: in one school of philosophy alone we have Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius. Yet, curiously enough, it is represented in our tradition by something very like a mere void. There are practically no complete books preserved, only fragments and indirect quotations. Consequently in the search for information about this age we must throw our nets wide. Beside books and inscriptions of the Hellenistic period proper I have drawn on Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and the like for evidence about their teachers and masters. I have used many Christian and Gnostic documents and works like the Corpus of Hermetic writings and the Mithras Liturgy. Among modern writers I must acknowledge a special debt to the researches of Dieterich, Cumont, Bousset, Wendland, and Reitzenstein.
The Hellenistic Age seems at first sight to have entered on an inheritance such as our speculative Anarchists sometimes long for, a tabula rasa, on which a new and highly gifted generation of thinkers might write clean and certain the book of their discoveries about life—what Herodotus would call their 'Historiê'. For, as we have seen in the last essay, it is clear that by the time of Plato the traditional religion of the Greek states was, if taken at its face value, a bankrupt concern. There was hardly one aspect in which it could bear criticism; and in the kind of test that chiefly matters, the satisfaction of men's ethical requirements and aspirations, it was if anything weaker than elsewhere. Now a religious p. 127 belief that is scientifically preposterous may still have a long and comfortable life before it. Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.
This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. But the Polis too, as we have seen in the last essay, fell with the rise of Macedon. It fell, perhaps, not from any special spiritual fault of its own; it had few faults except its fatal narrowness; but simply because there now existed another social whole, which, whether higher or lower in civilization, was at any rate utterly superior in brute force and in money. Devotion to the Polis lost its reality when the Polis, with all that it represented of rights and laws and ideals of Life, lay at the mercy of a military despot, who might, of course, be a hero, but might equally well be a vulgar sot or a corrupt adventurer.
What the succeeding ages built upon the ruins of the Polis is not our immediate concern. In the realm of thought, on the whole, the Polis triumphed. Aristotle based his social theory on the Polis, not the nation. Dicaearchus, Didymus, and Posidonius followed him, and we still use his language. Rome herself was a Polis, as well as an Empire. And Professor Haverfield has pointed out that a City has more chance of taking in the whole world to its freedoms and privileges p. 128 than a Nation has of making men of alien birth its compatriots. A Jew of Tarsus could easily be granted the civic rights of Rome: he could never have been made an Italian or a Frenchman. The Stoic ideal of the World as 'one great City of Gods and Men' has not been surpassed by any ideal based on the Nation.
What we have to consider is the general trend of religious thought from, say, the Peripatetics to the Gnostics. It is a fairly clear history. A soil once teeming with wild weeds was to all appearance swept bare and made ready for new sowing: skilled gardeners chose carefully the best of herbs and plants and tended the garden sedulously. But the bounds of the garden kept spreading all the while into strange untended ground, and even within the original walls the weeding had been hasty and incomplete. At the end of a few generations all was a wilderness of weeds again, weeds rank and luxuriant and sometimes extremely beautiful, with a half-strangled garden flower or two gleaming here and there in the tangle of them. Does that comparison seem disrespectful to religion? Is philosophy all flowers and traditional belief all weeds? Well, think what a weed is. It is only a name for all the natural wild vegetation which the earth sends up of herself, which lives and will live without the conscious labour of man. The flowers are what we keep alive with difficulty; the weeds are what conquer us.
It has been well observed by Zeller that the great weakness of all ancient thought, not excepting Socratic thought, was that instead of appealing to objective experiment it appealed to some subjective p. 129 sense of fitness. There were exceptions, of course: Democritus, Eratosthenes, Hippocrates, and to a great extent Aristotle. But in general there was a strong tendency to follow Plato in supposing that people could really solve questions by an appeal to their inner consciousness. One result of this, no doubt, was a tendency to lay too much stress on mere agreement. It is obvious, when one thinks about it, that quite often a large number of people who know nothing about a subject will all agree and all be wrong. Yet we find the most radical of ancient philosophers unconsciously dominated by the argument ex consensu gentium. It is hard to find two more uncompromising thinkers than Zeno and Epicurus. Yet both of them, when they are almost free from the popular superstitions, when they have constructed complete systems which, if not absolutely logic-proof, are calculated at least to keep out the weather for a century or so, open curious side-doors at the last moment and let in all the gods of mythology.129_1 True, they are admitted as suspicious characters, and under promise of good behaviour. Epicurus explains that they do not and cannot do anything whatever to anybody; Zeno explains that they are not anthropomorphic, and are only symbols or emanations or subordinates of the all-ruling Unity; both parties get rid of the myths. But the two great reformers have admitted a dangerous principle. The general consensus of humanity, they say, shows that there are gods, and gods which in mind, if not also in visual p. 130 appearance, resemble man. Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted nothing more. But the Stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more dangerous elements still.
I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools. On the whole both of them fought steadily and strongly against the growth of superstition, or, if you like to put it in other language, against the dumb demands of man's infra-rational nature. The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world, and, like the old Spartans, never to have yielded one inch of ground to the common foe.
The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things—that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.
Let us first consider the result of the mere denial of the Olympian religion. The essential postulate of that religion was that the world is governed by a number of definite personal gods, possessed of a human sense of justice and fairness and capable of being p. 131 influenced by normal human motives. In general, they helped the good and punished the bad, though doubtless they tended too much to regard as good those who paid them proper attention and as bad those who did not.
Speaking broadly, what was left when this conception proved inadequate? If it was not these personal gods who made things happen, what was it? If the Tower of Siloam was not deliberately thrown down by the gods so as to kill and hurt a carefully collected number of wicked people, while letting the good escape, what was the explanation of its falling? The answer is obvious, but it can be put in two ways. You can either say: 'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. It was bound to fall.'
There is no real difference in these statements, at least in the meaning of those who ordinarily utter them. Both are compatible with a reasonable and scientific view of the world. But in the Hellenistic Age, when Greek thought was spreading rapidly and superficially over vast semi-barbarous populations whose minds were not ripe for it, both views turned back instinctively into a theology as personal as that of the Olympians. It was not, of course, Zeus or Apollo who willed this; every one knew so much: it happened by Chance. That is, Chance or Fortune willed it. And became a goddess like the rest. The great catastrophes, the great transformations of the p. 132 mediterranean world which marked the Hellenistic period, had a strong influence here. If Alexander and his generals had practised some severely orthodox Macedonian religion, it would have been easy to see that the Gods of Macedon were the real rulers of the world. But they most markedly did not. They accepted hospitably all the religions that crossed their path. Some power or other was disturbing the world, that was clear. It was not exactly the work of man, because sometimes the good were exalted, sometimes the bad; there was no consistent purpose in the story. It was just Fortune. Happy is the man who knows how to placate Fortune and make her smile upon him!
It is worth remembering that the best seed-ground for superstition is a society in which the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no relation to their merits and efforts. A stable and well-governed society does tend, speaking roughly, to ensure that the Virtuous and Industrious Apprentice shall succeed in life, while the Wicked and Idle Apprentice fails. And in such a society people tend to lay stress on the reasonable or visible chains of causation. But in a country suffering from earthquakes or pestilences, in a court governed by the whim of a despot, in a district which is habitually the seat of a war between alien armies, the ordinary virtues of diligence, honesty, and kindliness seem to be of little avail. The only way to escape destruction is to win the favour of the prevailing powers, take the side of the strongest invader, flatter the despot, placate the Fate or Fortune or angry god that is sending the earthquake or the pestilence. The Hellenistic period pretty certainly p. 133 falls in some degree under all of these categories. And one result is the sudden and enormous spread of the worship of Fortune. Of course, there was always a protest. There is the famous
taken by Juvenal from the Greek. There are many unguarded phrases and at least three corrections in Polybius.133_1 Most interesting of all perhaps, there is the first oration of Plutarch on the Fortune of Alexander.133_2 A sentence in Pliny's Natural History, ii. 22, seems to go back to Hellenistic sources:
'Throughout the whole world, at every place and hour, by every voice Fortune alone is invoked and her name spoken: she is the one defendant, the one culprit, the one thought in men's minds, the one object of praise, the one cause. She is worshipped with insults, counted as fickle and often as blind, wandering, inconsistent, elusive, changeful, and friend of the unworthy. . . . We are so much at the mercy of chance that Chance is our god.'
The word used is first Fortuna and then Sors. This shows how little real difference there is between the two apparently contradictory conceptions.—'Chance would have it so.' 'It was fated to be.' The sting of both phrases—their pleasant bitterness when played with, their quality of poison when believed—lies in their denial of the value of human endeavour.
Yet on the whole, as one might expect, the believers in Destiny are a more respectable congregation than the worshippers of Chance. It requires a certain amount of thoughtfulness to rise to the conception that nothing really happens without a cause. It is the beginning, perhaps, of science. Ionic philosophers of the fifth century had laid stress on the ,134_1 what we should call the Chain of causes in Nature. After the rise of Stoicism Fate becomes something less physical, more related to conscious purpose. It is not Anankê but Heimarmenê. Heimarmenê, in the striking simile of Zeno,134_2 is like a fine thread running through the whole of existence—the world, we must remember, was to the Stoics a live p. 135 thing—like that invisible thread of life which, in heredity, passes on from generation to generation of living species and keeps the type alive; it runs causing, causing for ever, both the infinitesimal and the infinite. It is the ,135_1 the , the Reason of the World or the mind of Zeus, rather difficult to distinguish from the Pronoia or Providence which is the work of God and indeed the very essence of God. Thus it is not really an external and alien force. For the human soul itself is a fragment or effluence of the divine, and this Law of God is also the law of man's own Phusis. As long as you act in accordance with your true self you are complying with that divine or , whose service is perfect freedom. Only when you are false to your own nature and become a rebel against the kingdom of God which is within you, are you dragged perforce behind the chariot-wheels. The doctrine is implied in Cleanthes' celebrated Hymn to Destiny and is explained clearly by Plotinus.135_2
That is a noble conception. But the vulgar of course can turn Kismet into a stupid idol, as easily as they can Fortune. And Epicurus may have had some excuse for exclaiming that he would sooner be a slave to the old gods of the vulgar, than to the Destiny of the philosophers.135_3
So much for the result in superstitious minds of the denial, or rather the removal, of the Olympian Gods. It landed men in the worship of Fortune or of Fate.
Next, let us consider what happened when, instead of merely rejecting the Gods en masse, people tried carefully to collect what remained of religion after the Olympian system fell.
Aristotle himself gives us a fairly clear answer. He held that the origins of man's idea () of the Divine were twofold,136_1 the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena of the human soul. It is very much what Kant found two thousand years later. The spectacle of the vast and ordered movements of the heavenly bodies are compared by him in a famous fragment with the marching forth of Homer's armies before Troy. Behind such various order and strength there must surely be a conscious mind capable
It is only a step from this to regarding the sun, moon, and stars as themselves divine, and it is a step which both Plato and Aristotle, following Pythagoras and followed by the Stoics, take with confidence. Chrysippus gives practically the same list of gods: 'the Sun, Moon, and Stars; and Law: and men who have become Gods.'136_2 Both the wandering stars and the fixed stars are 'animate beings, divine and eternal', self-acting subordinate gods. As to the divinity of the soul or the mind of man, the earlier generations are shy about it. But in the later Stoics it is itself a portion of the divine life. It shows this ordinarily by its power of reason, and more conspicuously by becoming , or 'filled with God', in its exalted p. 137 moments of prevision, ecstasy, and prophetic dreams. If reason itself is divine, there is something else in the soul which is even higher than reason or at least more surprisingly divine.
Let us follow the history of both these remaining substitutes for the Olympian gods.
First for the Heavenly bodies. If they are to be made divine, we can hardly stop there. The Earth is also a divine being. Old tradition has always said so, and Plato has repeated it. And if Earth is divine, so surely are the other elements, the Stoicheia, Water, Air, and above all, Fire. For the Gods themselves are said by Plato to be made of fire, and the Stars visibly are so. Though perhaps the heavenly Fire is really not our Fire at all, but a , a 'Fifth Body', seeing that it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed.
This is persuasive enough and philosophic; but whither has it led us? Back to the Olympians, or rather behind the Olympians; as St. Paul puts it (Gal. iv. 9), to 'the beggarly elements'. The old Korê, or Earth Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of time all over the Aegean area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with her two lions; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus; in Sparta with her great marsh birds; in Boeotia with her horse. She runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and post-Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father and the Son: that is ancient and natural. But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the Pneuma. Since the word p. 138 for 'spirit' is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, 'Ruah', is mostly feminine. In the meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this goddess. In the old religion of Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a Maiden, then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is evidence also for a third stage, the widowhood of withering autumn.138_1 To the classical Greek this motherhood was quite as it should be, a due fulfilment of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and his kind it connoted a 'fall', a passage from the glory of Virginity to a state of Sin.138_2 The Korê becomes a fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or even a female devil; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the Redeemer.138_3 As far as I have observed, she loses most of her earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene or even Helen she keeps up her affinity with the Moon.
Almost all the writers of the Hellenistic Age agree in regarding the Sun, Moon, and Stars as gods. The rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus, before going on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all religions are really attempts towards the same goal, he clinches his argument by p. 139 observing that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we call them by different names in all languages.139_1 But the belief does not seem to have had much religious intensity in it, until it was reinforced by two alien influences.
First, we have the ancient worship of the Sun, implicit, if not explicit, in a great part of the oldest Greek rituals, and then idealized by Plato in the Republic, where the Sun is the author of all light and life in the material world, as the Idea of Good is in the ideal world. This worship came gradually into contact with the traditional and definite Sun-worship of Persia. The final combination took place curiously late. It was the Roman conquests of Cilicia, Cappadocia, Commagene, and Armenia that gave the decisive moment.139_2 To men who had wearied of the myths of the poets, who could draw no more inspiration from their Apollo and Hyperion, but still had the habits and the craving left by their old Gods, a fresh breath of reality came with the entrance of , 'Mithras, the Unconquered Sun'. But long before the triumph of Mithraism as the military religion of the Roman frontier, Greek literature is permeated with a kind of intense language about the Sun, which seems derived from Plato.139_3 In later times, in the fourth century a. d. for instance, it has absorbed some more full-blooded and less critical element as well.
Secondly, all the seven planets. These had a curious history. The planets were of course divine and living bodies, so much Plato gave us. Then come arguments and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit? The latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us: we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury as . It is the star of Hermes, and Hermes is the spirit who guides it.140_1 Even Plato in his old age had much to say about the souls of the seven planets. Further, each planet has its sphere. The Earth is in the centre, then comes the sphere of the Moon, then that of the Sun, and so on through a range of seven spheres. If all things are full of gods, as the wise ancients have said, what about those parts of the sphere in which the shining planet for the moment is not? Are they without god? Obviously not. The whole sphere is filled with innumerable spirits everywhere. It is all Hermes, all Aphrodite. (We are more familiar with the Latin names, Mercury and Venus.) But one part only is visible. The voice of one school, as usual, is raised in opposition. One veteran had seen clearly from the beginning whither all this sort of thing was sure to lead. 'Epicurus approves none of these things.'140_2 It was no p. 141 good his having destroyed the old traditional superstition, if people by deifying the stars were to fill the sky with seven times seven as many objects of worship as had been there before. He allows no Schwärmerei about the stars. They are not divine animate beings, or guided by Gods. Why cannot the astrologers leave God in peace? When their orbits are irregular it is not because they are looking for food. They are just conglomerations of ordinary atoms of air or fire—it does not matter which. They are not even very large—only about as large as they look, or perhaps smaller, since most fires tend to look bigger at a distance. They are not at all certainly everlasting. It is quite likely that the sun comes to an end every day, and a new one rises in the morning. All kinds of explanations are possible, and none certain. In any case, as you value your life and your reason, do not begin making myths about them!
On other lines came what might have been the effective protest of real Science, when Aristarchus of Samos (250 b. c.) argued that the earth was not really the centre of the universe, but revolved round the Sun. But his hypothesis did not account for the phenomena as completely as the current theory with its 'Epicycles'; his fellow astronomers were against him; Cleanthes the Stoic denounced him for 'disturbing the Hearth of the Universe', and his heresy made little headway.141_1
The planets in their seven spheres surrounding the earth continued to be objects of adoration. They had their special gods or guiding spirits assigned them. Their ordered movements through space, it was held, p. 142 produce a vast and eternal harmony. It is beautiful beyond all earthly music, this Music of the Spheres, beyond all human dreams of what music might be. The only pity is that—except for a few individuals in trances—nobody has ever heard it. Circumstances seem always to be unfavourable. It may be that we are too far off, though, considering the vastness of the orchestra, this seems improbable. More likely we are merely deaf to it because it never stops and we have been in the middle of it since we first drew breath.142_1
The planets also become Elements in the Kosmos, Stoicheia. It is significant that in Hellenistic theology the word Stoicheion, Element, gets to mean a Daemon—as Megathos, Greatness, means an Angel.142_2 But behold a mystery! The word Stoicheia, 'elementa', had long been used for the Greek A B C, and in particular for the seven vowels . That is no chance, no mere coincidence. The vowels are the mystic signs of the Planets; they have control over the planets. Hence strange prayers and magic formulae innumerable.
Even the way of reckoning time changed under the influence of the Planets. Instead of the old division of the month into three periods of nine days, we find gradually establishing itself the week of seven days with each day named after its planet, Sun, Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, Kronos. The history of the Planet week is given by Dio Cassius, xxxvii. 18, p. 143 in his account of the Jewish campaign of Pompeius. But it was not the Jewish week. The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. It was the old week of Babylon, the original home of astronomy and planet-worship.143_1
For here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to minds reluctantly and superficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. Even in the old days Aeschylus had called the planets 'bright potentates, shining in the fire of heaven', and Euripides had spoken of the 'shaft hurled from a star'.143_2 But we are told that the first teaching of astrology in Hellenic lands was in the time of Alexander, when Bêrôssos the Chaldaean set up a school in Cos and, according to Seneca, Belum interpretatus est. This must mean that he translated into Greek the 'Eye of Bel', a treatise in seventy tablets found in the library of Assur-bani-pal (686-626 b. c.) but composed for Sargon I in the third millennium b. c. Even the philosopher Theophrastus is reported by Proclus143_3 as saying that 'the most extraordinary thing of his age was the lore of the Chaldaeans, who foretold not only events of public interest but even the lives and deaths of individuals'. One wonders slightly whether Theophrastus spoke with as much implicit faith as Proclus suggests. But the chief account is given by Diodorus, ii. 30 (perhaps from Hecataeus).
'Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. It is so recent and so constantly changing. They have traditions which come from vast antiquity and never change. Notably the Chaldaeans have collected observations of the Stars through long ages, and teach how every event in the heavens has its meaning, as part of the eternal scheme of divine forethought. Especially the seven Wanderers, or Planets, are called by them Hermêneis, Interpreters: and among them the Interpreter in chief is Saturn. Their work is to interpret beforehand , the thought that is in the mind of the Gods. By their risings and settings, and by the colours they assume, the Chaldaeans predict great winds and storms and waves of excessive heat, comets, and earthquakes, and in general all changes fraught with weal or woe not only to nations and regions of the world, but to kings and to ordinary men and women. Beneath the Seven are thirty Gods of Counsel, half below and half above the Earth; every ten days a Messenger or Angel star passes from above below and another from below above. Above these gods are twelve Masters, who are the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and the planets pass through all the Houses of these twelve in turn. The Chaldaeans have made prophecies for various kings, such as Alexander who conquered Darius, and Antigonus and Seleucus Nikator, and have always been right. And private persons who have consulted them consider their wisdom as marvellous and above human power.'
Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people. The tomb of Ozymandias, as described by Diodorus (i. 49, 5), was covered with astrological symbols, and that of Antiochus I, which has been discovered in Commagene, is of the same character. It was natural for monarchs to believe that the stars watched p. 145 over them. But every one was ready to receive the germ. The Epicureans, of course, held out, and so did Panaetius, the coolest head among the Stoics. But the Stoics as a whole gave way. They formed with good reason the leading school of philosophy, and it would have been a service to mankind if they had resisted. But they were already committed to a belief in the deity of the stars and to the doctrine of Heimarmenê, or Destiny. They believed in the pervading Pronoia,145_1 or Forethought, of the divine mind, and in the —the Sympathy of all Creation,145_2 whereby whatever happens to any one part, however remote or insignificant, affects all the rest. It seemed only a natural and beautiful illustration of this Sympathy that the movements of the Stars should be bound up with the sufferings of man. They also appealed to the general belief in prophecy and divination.145_3 If a prophet can foretell that such and such an event will happen, then it is obviously fated to happen. Foreknowledge implies Predestination. This belief in prophecy was, in reality, a sort of appeal to fact and to common sense. People could produce then, as they can now, a large number of striking cases of second sight, presentiment, clairvoyance, actual prophecy and the like;145_4 and it was more difficult then to test them.
The argument involved Stoicism with some questionable allies. Epicureans and sceptics of the Academy might well mock at the sight of a great man like Chrysippus or Posidonius resting an important part of his religion on the undetected frauds of a shady Levantine 'medium'. Still the Stoics could not but welcome the arrival of a system of prophecy and predestination which, however the incredulous might rail at it, possessed at least great antiquity and great stores of learning, which was respectable, recondite, and in a way sublime.
In all the religious systems of later antiquity, if I mistake not, the Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,146_1 repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of 'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by Hippolytus,146_2 and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and even Cicero in his Somnium Scipionis, are full of the influence of the seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our fate, and decreed, or at least registered p. 147 the decree, that in spite of all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good, beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion-headed God, the evil Jehovah.147_1 The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.
In author after author, in one community after another, the subject recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still. We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance—to say nothing of damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an Eighth region—they call it simply the Ogdoas—the home of the ultimate God,147_2 whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an , an effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate p. 148 God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers them unterrified: , 'I am your fellow wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become God'.148_1 The Gnostic writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to its ultimate home.
That journey awaits us after death; but in the meantime? In the meantime there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. To see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death. But to see Him after due purification, to be led to Him along the true Way by an initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We have one in the Mithras-Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum. Apuleius148_2 tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how he was initiated to Isis and became 'her image'. After much fasting, clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the threshold of Death and passed through all the Elements. The Sun shone upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods of Heaven and of Hades. In the morning he was clad p. 149 in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it.
There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St. Paul, we may remember, knew personally a man who had actually been snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words;149_1 whether in the body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells us, was united with God in trance four times in five years.149_2
We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity p. 150 of early Greek religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of man with God came regularly through Ekstasis—the soul must get clear of its body—and Enthousiasmos—the God must enter and dwell inside the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kourêtes with their Zeus Kourês150_1 and those strange hierophants of the 'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of Hellenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,150_2 'that thou mayst be what I am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been 'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.150_3
In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself saw a Mesîtês, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual, the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis, when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century b. c. established their own temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.
Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the young priest became regularly the 'son' of the old priest. It is a form p. 152 that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe says of her cosmological doctrines,
It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple. In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with God which he himself has trodden before. At the end of the Mithras liturgy the devotee who has passed through the mystic ordeals and seen his god face to face, is told: 'After this you can show the way to others.'
But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul.
If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference between Man and God. Sophrosynê in religion was the message of the classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first Theos. At any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.152_2 Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism p. 153 and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or megalomania. But the effort was too great for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers—all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers—become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came about.
First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of the divine element in man's soul.153_1 Aristotle himself built an altar to Plato. He did nothing superstitious; he did not call Plato a god, but we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that he naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little strange to us. It is the same emotion—a noble and just emotion on the whole—which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders as 'heroes', and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the memories and the worship of saints. But we should remember that only a rare mind will make its divine man of such material as Plato. The common way to dazzle men's eyes is a more brutal and obvious one.
To people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a God-Man it was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander. His tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achievements beggaring the fables of the poets, put people in the right mind for worship. Then came the fact that the kings whom he conquered were, as a matter of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as p. 154 divine beings.154_1 It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for those who worshipped the 'God'154_2 Darius to feel that it was no man but a greater god who had overthrown Darius. The incense which had been burned before those conquered gods was naturally offered to their conqueror. He did not refuse it. It was not good policy to do so, and self-depreciation is not apt to be one of the weaknesses of the born ruler.154_3 But besides all this, if you are to judge a God by his fruits, what God could produce better credentials? Men had often seen Zeus defied with impunity; they had seen faithful servants of Apollo come to bad ends. But those who defied Alexander, however great they might be, always rued their defiance, and those who were faithful to him always received their reward. With his successors the worship became more official. Seleucus, Ptolemaeus, Antigonus, Demetrius, all in different degrees and different styles are deified by the acclamations of adoring subjects. Ptolemy Philadelphus seems to have been the first to claim definite divine honours during his own life. On the death of his wife in 271 he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the worship of the Theoi Adelphoi, the 'Gods Brethren'. Of course there was flattery in all this, ordinary self-interested lying flattery, and its p. 155 inevitable accompaniment, megalomania. Any reading of the personal history of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae or the Caesars shows it. But that is not the whole explanation.
One of the characteristics of the period of the Diadochi is the accumulation of capital and military force in the hands of individuals. The Ptolemies and Seleucidae had at any moment at their disposal powers very much greater than any Pericles or Nicias or Lysander.155_1 The folk of the small cities of the Aegean hinterlands must have felt towards these great strangers almost as poor Indian peasants in time of flood and famine feel towards an English official. There were men now on earth who could do the things that had hitherto been beyond the power of man. Were several cities thrown down by earthquake; here was one who by his nod could build them again. Famines had always occurred and been mostly incurable. Here was one who could without effort allay a famine. Provinces were harried and wasted by habitual wars: the eventual conqueror had destroyed whole provinces in making the wars; now, as he had destroyed, he could also save. 'What do you mean by a god,' the simple man might say, 'if these men are not gods? The only difference is that these gods are visible, and the old gods no man has seen.'
The titles assumed by all the divine kings tell the story clearly. Antiochus Epiphanês—'the god made manifest'; Ptolemaios Euergetês, Ptolemaios Sôtêr. Occasionally we have a Keraunos or a Nikator, a p. 156 'Thunderbolt' or a 'God of Mana', but mostly it is Sôtêr, Euergetês and Epiphanês, the Saviour, the Benefactor, the God made manifest, in constant alternation. In the honorific inscriptions and in the writings of the learned, philanthropy () is by far the most prominent characteristic of the God upon earth. Was it that people really felt that to save or benefit mankind was a more godlike thing than to blast and destroy them? Philosophers have generally said that, and the vulgar pretended to believe them. It was at least politic, when ministering to the half-insane pride of one of these princes, to remind him of his mercy rather than of his wrath.
Wendland in his brilliant book, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, calls attention to an inscription of the year 196 b. c. in honour of the young Ptolemaios Epiphanês, who was made manifest at the age of twelve years.156_1 It is a typical document of Graeco-Egyptian king-worship:
'In the reign of the young king by inheritance from his Father, Lord of the Diadems, great in glory, pacificator of Egypt and pious towards the gods, superior over his adversaries, Restorer of the life of man, Lord of the Periods of Thirty Years, like Hephaistos the Great, King like the Sun, the Great King of the Upper and Lower Lands; offspring of the Gods of the Love of the Father, whom Hephaistos has approved, to whom the Sun has given Victory; living image of Zeus; Son of the Sun, Ptolemaios the ever-living, beloved by Phtha; in the ninth year of Aëtos son of Aëtos, Priest of Alexander and the Gods Saviours and the Gods Brethren and the Gods p. 157 Benefactors and the Gods of the Love of the Father and the God Manifest for whom thanks be given:'
The Priests who came to his coronation ceremony at Memphis proclaim:
'Seeing that King Ptolemaios ever-living, beloved of Phtha, God Manifest for whom Thanks be given, born of King Ptolemaios and Queen Arsinoe, the Gods of the Love of the Father, has done many benefactions to the Temples and those in them and all those beneath his rule, being from the beginning God born of God and Goddess, like Horus son of Isis and Osiris, who came to the help of his father Osiris (and?) in his benevolent disposition towards the Gods has consecrated to the temples revenues of silver and of corn, and has undergone many expenses in order to lead Egypt into the sunlight and give peace to the Temples, and has with all his powers shown love of mankind.'
When the people of Lycopolis revolted, we hear:
'in a short time he took the city by storm and slew all the Impious who dwelt in it, even as Hermes and Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, conquered those who of old revolted in the same regions . . . in return for which the Gods have granted him Health Victory Power and all other good things, the Kingdom remaining to him and his sons for time everlasting.'157_1
The conclusion which the Priests draw from these facts is that the young king's titles and honours are insufficient and should be increased. It is a typical and terribly un-Hellenic document of the Hellenistic God-man in his appearance as King.
Now the early successors of Alexander mostly professed themselves members of the Stoic school, and in the mouth of a Stoic this doctrine of the potential divinity of man was an inspiring one. To them virtue was the really divine thing in man; and the most divine kind of virtue was that of helping humanity. To love and help humanity is, according to Stoic doctrine, the work and the very essence of God. If you take away Pronoia from God, says Chrysippus,158_1 it is like taking away light and heat from fire. This doctrine is magnificently expressed by Pliny in a phrase that is probably translated from Posidonius: 'God is the helping of man by man; and that is the way to eternal glory.'158_2
The conception took root in the minds of many Romans. A great Roman governor often had the chance of thus helping humanity on a vast scale, and liked to think that such a life opened the way to heaven. 'One should conceive', says Cicero (Tusc. i. p. 159 32), 'the gods as like men who feel themselves born for the work of helping, defending, and saving humanity. Hercules has passed into the number of the gods. He would never have so passed if he had not built up that road for himself while he was among mankind.'
I have been using some rather late authors, though the ideas seem largely to come from Posidonius.159_1 But before Posidonius the sort of fact on which we have been dwelling had had its influence on religious speculation. When Alexander made his conquering journey to India and afterwards was created a god, it was impossible not to reflect that almost exactly the same story was related in myth about Dionysus. Dionysus had started from India and travelled in the other direction: that was the only difference. A flood of light seemed to be thrown on all the traditional mythology, which, of course, had always been a puzzle to thoughtful men. It was impossible to believe it as it stood, and yet hard—in an age which had not the conception of any science of mythology—to think it was all a mass of falsehood, and the great Homer and Hesiod no better than liars. But the generation which witnessed the official deification of the various Seleucidae and Ptolemies seemed suddenly to see light. The traditional gods, from Heracles and Dionysus up to Zeus and Cronos and even Ouranos, were simply old-world rulers and benefactors of mankind, who had, by their own p. 160 insistence or the gratitude of their subjects, been transferred to the ranks of heaven. For that is the exact meaning of making them divine: they are classed among the true immortals, the Sun and Moon and Stars and Corn and Wine, and the everlasting elements.
The philosophic romance of Euhemerus, published early in the third century b. c., had instantaneous success and enormous influence.160_1 It was one of the first Greek books translated into Latin, and became long afterwards a favourite weapon of the Christian fathers in their polemics against polytheism. 'Euhemerism' was, on the face of it, a very brilliant theory; and it had, as we have noticed, a special appeal for the Romans.
Yet, if such a conception might please the leisure of a statesman, it could hardly satisfy the serious thought of a philosopher or a religious man. If man's soul really holds a fragment of God and is itself a divine being, its godhead cannot depend on the possession of great riches and armies and organized subordinates. If 'the helping of man by man is God', the help in question cannot be material help. The religion which ends in deifying only kings and millionaires may be vulgarly popular but is self-condemned.
As a matter of fact the whole tendency of Greek philosophy after Plato, with some illustrious exceptions, especially among the Romanizing Stoics, was away from the outer world towards the world of the soul. We find in the religious writings of this period that the real Saviour of men is not he who protects p. 161 them against earthquake and famine, but he who in some sense saves their souls. He reveals to them the Gnôsis Theou, the Knowledge of God. The 'knowledge' in question is not a mere intellectual knowledge. It is a complete union, a merging of beings. And, as we have always to keep reminding our cold modern intelligence, he who has 'known' God is himself thereby deified. He is the Image of God, the Son of God, in a sense he is God.161_1 The stratum of ideas described in the first of the studies will explain the ease with which transition took place. The worshipper of Bacchos became Bacchos simply enough, because in reality the God Bacchos was originally only the projection of the human Bacchoi. And in the Hellenistic age the notion of these secondary mediating gods was made easier by the analogy of the human interpreters. Of course, we have abundant instances of actual preachers and miracle-workers who on their own authority posed, and were accepted, as gods. The adventure of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra161_2 shows how easily such things could happen. But as a rule, I suspect, the most zealous priest or preacher preferred to have his God in the background. He preaches, he heals the sick and casts out devils, not in his own name but in the name of One who sent him. This actual present priest who initiates you or me is himself already an Image of God; but above him there are greater and p. 162 wiser priests, above them others, and above all there is the one eternal Divine Mediator, who being in perfection both man and God can alone fully reveal God to man, and lead man's soul up the heavenly path, beyond Change and Fate and the Houses of the Seven Rulers, to its ultimate peace. I have seen somewhere a Gnostic or early Christian emblem which indicates this doctrine. Some Shepherd or Saviour stands, his feet on the earth, his head towering above the planets, lifting his follower in his outstretched arms.
The Gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body of Christian heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the Hellenistic world before Christianity as well as after. They must have been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos. Their Saviour, like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men's minds before the Saviour of the Christians. 'If we look close', says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnôsis, but was already present there under various forms.'162_1 He occurs notably in two pre-Christian documents, discovered by the keen analysis and profound learning of Dr. Reitzenstein: the Poimandres revelation printed in the Corpus Hermeticum, and the sermon of the Naassenes in Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, which is combined with Attis-worship.162_2 The violent anti-Jewish bias of most of the sects—they p. 163 speak of 'the accursed God of the Jews' and identify him with Saturn and the Devil—points on the whole to pre-Christian conditions: and a completely non-Christian standpoint is still visible in the Mandaean and Manichean systems.
Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Sôtêr' of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of Jesus or 'Christos', 'the Anointed', tends gradually to supersede. Above all he is, in some sense, Man, or 'the Second Man' or 'the Son of Man'. The origin of this phrase needs a word of explanation. Since the ultimate unseen God, spirit though He is, made man in His image, since holy men (and divine kings) are images of God, it follows that He is Himself Man. He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of whom all bodily men are feeble copies. He is also the Father; the Saviour is his Son, 'the Image of the Father', 'the Second Man', 'the Son of Man'. The method in which he performs his mystery of Redemption varies. It is haunted by the memory of the old Suffering and Dying God, of whom we spoke in the first of these studies. It is vividly affected by the ideal 'Righteous Man' of Plato, who 'shall be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified'.163_1 But in p. 164 the main he descends, of his free will or by the eternal purpose of the Father, from Heaven through the spheres of all the Archontes or Kosmokratores, the planets, to save mankind, or sometimes to save the fallen Virgin, the Soul, Wisdom, or 'the Pearl'.164_1 The Archontes let him pass because he is disguised; they do not know him (cf. 1 Cor. ii. 7 ff.). When his work is done he ascends to Heaven to sit by the side of the Father in glory; he conquers the Archontes, leads them captive in his triumph, strips them of their armour (Col. ii. 15; cf. the previous verse), sometimes even crucifies them for ever in their places in the sky.164_2 The epistles to the Colossians and the Ephesians are much influenced by these doctrines. Paul himself constantly uses the language of them, but in the main we find him discouraging the excesses of superstition, reforming, ignoring, rejecting. His Jewish blood was perhaps enough to keep him to strict monotheism. Though he admits Angels and Archontes, Principalities and Powers, he scorns the Elements and he seems deliberately to reverse the doctrine of the first and second Man.164_3 He says nothing about the Trinity of Divine Beings that was usual in Gnosticism, nothing about the Divine Mother. His mind, for all its vehement mysticism, has something of that clean antiseptic quality that makes such early Christian works as the Octavius of Minucius Felix and the Epistle to Diognetus so infinitely refreshing. He is certainly one of the great figures in Greek literature, but his system lies p. 165 outside the subject of this essay. We are concerned only with those last manifestations of Hellenistic religion which probably formed the background of his philosophy. It is a strange experience, and it shows what queer stuff we humans are made of, to study these obscure congregations, drawn from the proletariate of the Levant, superstitious, charlatan-ridden, and helplessly ignorant, who still believed in Gods begetting children of mortal mothers, who took the 'Word', the 'Spirit', and the 'Divine Wisdom', to be persons called by those names, and turned the Immortality of the Soul into 'the standing up of the corpses';165_1 and to reflect that it was these who held the main road of advance towards the greatest religion of the western world.
I have tried to sketch in outline the main forms of belief to which Hellenistic philosophy moved or drifted. Let me dwell for a few pages more upon the characteristic method by which it reached them. It may be summed up in one word, Allegory. All Hellenistic philosophy from the first Stoics onward is permeated by allegory. It is applied to Homer, to the religious traditions, to the ancient rituals, to the whole world. To Sallustius after the end of our period the whole material world is only a great myth, a thing whose value lies not in itself but in the spiritual meaning which it hides and reveals. To Cleanthes at the beginning of it the Universe was a mystic pageant, in which the immortal stars were the dancers and the Sun the priestly torch-bearer.165_2 p. 166 Chrysippus reduced the Homeric gods to physical or ethical principles; and Crates, the great critic, applied allegory in detail to his interpretation of the all-wise poet.166_1 We possess two small but complete treatises which illustrate well the results of this tendency, Cornutus and the Homeric Allegories of Heraclitus, a brilliant little work of the first century b. c. I will not dwell upon details: they are abundantly accessible and individually often ridiculous. A by-product of the same activity is the mystic treatment of language: a certain Titan in Hesiod is named Koios. Why? Because the Titans are the elements and one of them is naturally the element of , the Ionic Greek for 'Quality'. The Egyptian Isis is derived from the root of the Greek , Knowledge, and the Egyptian Osiris from the Greek and ('holy' and 'sacred', or perhaps more exactly 'lawful' and 'tabu'). Is this totally absurd? I think not. If all human language is, as most of these thinkers believed, a divine institution, a cap filled to the brim with divine meaning, so that by reflecting deeply upon a word a pious philosopher can reach the secret that it holds, then there is no difficulty whatever in supposing that the special secret held by an Egyptian word may be found in Greek, or the secret of a Greek word in Babylonian. Language is One. The Gods who made all these languages equally could use them all, and wind them all intricately in and out, for the building up of their divine enigma.
We must make a certain effort of imagination to understand this method of allegory. It is not the p. 167 frigid thing that it seems to us. In the first place, we should remember that, as applied to the ancient literature and religious ritual, allegory was at least a vera causa—it was a phenomenon which actually existed. Heraclitus of Ephesus is an obvious instance. He deliberately expressed himself in language which should not be understood of the vulgar, and which bore a hidden meaning to his disciples. Pythagoras did the same. The prophets and religious writers must have done so to an even greater extent.167_1 And we know enough of the history of ritual to be sure that a great deal of it is definitely allegorical. The Hellenistic Age did not wantonly invent the theory of allegory.
And secondly, we must remember what states of mind tend especially to produce this kind of belief. They are not contemptible states of mind. It needs only a strong idealism with which the facts of experience clash, and allegory follows almost of necessity. The facts cannot be accepted as they are. They must needs be explained as meaning something different.
Take an earnest Stoic or Platonist, a man of fervid mind, who is possessed by the ideals of his philosophy and at the same time feels his heart thrilled by the beauty of the old poetry. What is he to do? On one side he can find Zoilus, or Plato himself, or the Cynic preachers, condemning Homer and the poets without remorse, as teachers of foolishness. He can treat poetry as the English puritans treated the stage. But is that a satisfactory solution? Remember that these generations were trained habitually to give great weight to the voice of their inner p. 168 consciousness, and the inner consciousness of a sensitive man cries out that any such solution is false: that Homer is not a liar, but noble and great, as our fathers have always taught us. On the other side comes Heraclitus the allegorist. 'If Homer used no allegories he committed all impieties.' On this theory the words can be allowed to possess all their old beauty and magic, but an inner meaning is added quite different from that which they bear on the surface. It may, very likely, be a duller and less poetic meaning; but I am not sure that the verses will not gain by the mere process of brooding study fully as much as they lose by the ultimate badness of the interpretation. Anyhow, that was the road followed. The men of whom I speak were not likely to give up any experience that seemed to make the world more godlike or to feed their spiritual and emotional cravings. They left that to the barefooted cynics. They craved poetry and they craved philosophy; if the two spoke like enemies, their words must needs be explained away by one who loved both.
The same process was applied to the world itself. Something like it is habitually applied by the religious idealists of all ages. A fundamental doctrine of Stoicism and most of the idealist creeds was the perfection and utter blessedness of the world, and the absolute fulfilment of the purpose of God. Now obviously this belief was not based on experience. The poor world, to do it justice amid all its misdoings, has never lent itself to any such barefaced deception as that. No doubt it shrieked against the doctrine then, as loud as it has always shrieked, so that even a Posidonian or a Pythagorean, his ears straining for the music of the spheres, was p. 169 sometimes forced to listen. And what was his answer? It is repeated in all the literature of these sects. 'Our human experience is so small: the things of the earth may be bad and more than bad, but, ah! if you only went beyond the Moon! That is where the true Kosmos begins.' And, of course, if we did ever go there, we all know they would say it began beyond the Sun. Idealism of a certain type will have its way; if hard life produces an ounce or a pound or a million tons of fact in the scale against it, it merely dreams of infinite millions in its own scale, and the enemy is outweighed and smothered. I do not wish to mock at these Posidonian Stoics and Hermetics and Gnostics and Neo-Pythagoreans. They loved goodness, and their faith is strong and even terrible. One feels rather inclined to bow down before their altars and cry: Magna est Delusio et praevalebit.
Yet on the whole one rises from these books with the impression that all this allegory and mysticism is bad for men. It may make the emotions sensitive, it certainly weakens the understanding. And, of course, in this paper I have left out of account many of the grosser forms of superstition. In any consideration of the balance, they should not be forgotten.
If a reader of Proclus and the Corpus Hermeticum wants relief, he will find it, perhaps, best in the writings of a gentle old Epicurean who lived at Oenoanda in Cappadocia about a. d. 200. His name was Diogenes.169_1 His works are preserved, in a fragmentary state, not on papyrus or parchment, but on the wall of a large portico where he engraved them for passers-by to read. He lived in a world of p. 170 superstition and foolish terror, and he wrote up the great doctrines of Epicurus for the saving of mankind.
'Being brought by age to the sunset of my life, and expecting at any moment to take my departure from the world with a glad song for the fullness of my happiness, I have resolved, lest I be taken too soon, to give help to those of good temperament. If one person or two or three or four, or any small number you choose, were in distress, and I were summoned out to help one after another, I would do all in my power to give the best counsel to each. But now, as I have said, the most of men lie sick, as it were of a pestilence, in their false beliefs about the world, and the tale of them increases; for by imitation they take the disease from one another, like sheep. And further it is only just to bring help to those who shall come after us—for they too are ours, though they be yet unborn; and love for man commands us also to help strangers who may pass by. Since therefore the good message of the Book has this wall and to set forth in public the medicine of the healing of mankind.'
The people of his time and neighbourhood seem to have fancied that the old man must have some bad motive. They understood mysteries and redemptions and revelations. They understood magic and curses. But they were puzzled, apparently, by this simple message, which only told them to use their reason, their courage, and their sympathy, and not to be afraid of death or of angry gods. The doctrine was condensed into four sentences of a concentrated eloquence that make a translator despair:170_1 'Nothing p. 171 to fear in God: Nothing to feel in Death: Good can be attained: Evil can be endured.'
Of course, the doctrines of this good old man do not represent the whole truth. To be guided by one's aversions is always a sign of weakness or defeat; and it is as much a failure of nerve to reject blindly for fear of being a fool, as to believe blindly for fear of missing some emotional stimulus.
There is no royal road in these matters. I confess it seems strange to me as I write here, to reflect that at this moment many of my friends and most of my fellow creatures are, as far as one can judge, quite confident that they possess supernatural knowledge. As a rule, each individual belongs to some body which has received in writing the results of a divine revelation. I cannot share in any such feeling. The Uncharted surrounds us on every side and we must needs have some relation towards it, a relation which will depend on the general discipline of a man's mind and the bias of his whole character. As far as knowledge and conscious reason will go, we should follow resolutely their austere guidance. When they cease, as cease they must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which, after all, most high truth has been reached as well as most high art and poetry: careful always really to seek for truth and not for our own emotional satisfaction, careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams; and remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very stars wander.
It is not my purpose to make anything like a systematic bibliography, but a few recommendations may be useful to some students who approach this subject, as I have done, from the side of classical Greek.
For Greek Philosophy I have used besides Plato and Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius and Philodemus, Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker; Diels, Doxographi Graeci; von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta; Usener, Epicurea; also the old Fragmenta Philosophorum of Mullach.
For later Paganism and Gnosticism, Reitzenstein, Poimandres; Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen; Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgic (also Abraxas, Nekyia, Muttererde, &c.); P. Wendland, Hellenistisch-Römische Kultur; Cumont, Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (also The Mysteries of Mithra, Chicago, 1903), and Les Religions Orientales dans l'Empire Romain; Seeck, Untergang der antiken Welt, vol. iii; Philo, de Vita Contemplativa, Conybeare; Gruppe, Griechische Religion and Mythologie, pp. 1458-1676; Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, with good bibliography in the introduction; articles by E. Bevan in the Quarterly Review, No. 424 (June 1910), and the Hibbert Journal, xi. 1 (October 1912). Dokumente der Gnosis, by W. Schultz (Jena, 1910), gives a highly subjective translation and reconstruction of most of the Gnostic documents: the Corpus Hermeticum is translated into English by G. R. S. Meade, Thrice Greatest Hermes, 1906. The first volume of Dr. Scott's monumental edition of the Hermetica (Clarendon Press, 1924) has appeared just too late to be used in the present volume.
For Jewish thought before the Christian era Dr. Charles's Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; also the same writer's Book of Enoch, and the Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments by Carl Clemen, Giessen, 1909.
Of Christian writers apart from the New Testament those that come most into account are Hippolytis ( a. d. 250), Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, Epiphanius (367-403), Panarion, and Irenaeus ( a. d. 202), Contra Haereses, i, ii. For a simple introduction to the problems presented by the New Testament literature I would venture to recommend Prof. Bacon's New Testament, in the Home University Library, and Dr. Estlin Carpenter's First Three Gospels. In such a vast literature I dare not make any further recommendations, but for a general introduction to the History of Religions with a good and brief bibliography I would refer the reader to Salomon Reinach's Orpheus (Paris, 1909; English translation the same year), a book of wide learning and vigorous thought.
124_1 Mr. Marett has pointed out that this conception has its roots deep in primitive human nature: The Birth of Humility, Oxford, 1910, p. 17. 'It would, perhaps, be fanciful to say that man tends to run away from the sacred as uncanny, to cower before it as secret, and to prostrate himself before it as tabu. On the other hand, it seems plain that to these three negative qualities of the sacred taken together there corresponds on the part of man a certain negative attitude of mind. Psychologists class the feelings bound up with flight, cowering, and prostration under the common head of "asthenic emotion". In plain English they are all forms of heart-sinking, of feeling unstrung. This general type of innate disposition would seem to be the psychological basis of Humility. Taken in its social setting, the emotion will, of course, show endless shades of complexity; for it will be excited, and again will find practical expression, in all sorts of ways. Under these varying conditions, however, it is reasonable to suppose that what Mr. McDougall would call the "central part" of the experience remains very much the same. In face of the sacred the normal man is visited by a heart-sinking, a wave of asthenic emotion.' Mr. Marett continues: 'If that were all, however, Religion would be a matter of pure fear. But it is not all. There is yet the positive side of the sacred to be taken into account.' It is worth remarking also that Schleiermacher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence without attempting to define the object towards which it was directed.
129_1 Usener, Epicurea (1887), pp. 232 ff.; Diels, Doxographi Graeci (1879), p. 306; Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903-5), Chrysippus 1014, 1019.
133_1 Juv. x. 365 f.; Polyb. ii. 38, 5; x. 5, 8; xviii. 11, 5.
133_2 Cf. also his Consolatio ad Apollonium. The earliest text is perhaps the interesting fragment of Demetrius of Phalerum (fr. 19, in F. H. G. ii. 368), written about 317 b. c. It is quoted with admiration by Polybius xxix. 21, with reference to the defeat of Perseus of Macedon by the Romans:
'One must often remember the saying of Demetrius of Phalerum . . . in his Treatise on Fortune. . . . "If you were to take not an indefinite time, nor many generations, but just the fifty years before this, you could see in them the violence of Fortune. Fifty years ago do you suppose that either the Macedonians or the King of Macedon, or the Persians or the King of Persia, if some God had foretold them what was to come, would ever have believed that by the present time the Persians, who were then masters of almost all the inhabited world, would have ceased to be even a geographical name, while the Macedonians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet this Fortune, who bears no relation to our method of life, but transforms everything in the way we do not expect and displays her power by surprises, is at the present moment showing all the world that, when she puts the Macedonians into the rich inheritance of the Persian, she has only lent them these good things until she changes her mind about them." Which has now happened in the case of Perseus. The words of Demetrius were a prophecy uttered, as it were, by inspired lips.'
134_1 Eur., Tro. 886. Literally it means 'The Compulsion in the way Things grow'.
134_2 Zeno, fr. 87, Arnim.
135_1 Chrysippus, fr. 913, Arnim.
135_2 Cleanthes, 527, Arnim. Plotinus, Enn. iii. i. 10.
135_3 Epicurus, Third Letter. Usener, p. 65, 12 = Diog. La. x. 134.
136_1 Aristotle, fr. 12 ff.
136_2 e. g. Chrysippus, fr. 1076, Arnim.
138_1 Themis, p. 180, n. 1.
138_2 Not to Plotinus: Enn. ii. ix against the Valentinians. Cf. Porphyry, , 28.
138_3 Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, pp. 13, 21, 26, 81, &c.; pp. 332 ff. She becomes Helen in the beautiful myth of the Simonian Gnostics—a Helen who has forgotten her name and race, and is a slave in a brothel in Tyre. Simon discovers her, gradually brings back her memory and redeems her. Irenaeus, i. 23, 2.
139_1 De Iside et Osiride, 67. (He distinguishes them from the real God, however, just as Sallustius would.)
139_2 Mithras was worshipped by the Cilician Pirates conquered by Pompey. Plut., Vit. Pomp. 24.
139_3 Plato (Diels, 305); Stoics, ib. 547, l. 8.
140_1 Aristotle (Diels, 450). Chrysippus (Diels 466); Posidonius, ib. (cf. Plato, Laws. 898 ff.). See Epicurus's Second Letter, especially Usener, pp. 36-47 = Diog. La. x. 86-104. On the food required by the heavenly bodies cf. Chrysippus, fr. 658-61, Arnim.
140_2 Diels, 307a 15. Cf. 432a 10.
141_1 Heath, Aristarchos of Samos, pp. 301-10.
142_1 Pythagoras in Diels, p. 555, 20; the best criticism is in Aristotle, De Caelo, chap. 9 (p. 290 b), the fullest account in Macrobius, Comm. in Somn. Scipionis, ii.
142_2 See Diels, Elementium, 1899, p. 17. These magic letters are still used in the Roman ritual for the consecration of churches.
143_1 A seven-day week was known to Pseudo-Hippocrates ad fin., but the date of that treatise is very uncertain.
143_2 Aesch., Ag. 6; Eur., Hip. 530. Also Ag. 365, where goes together and .
143_3 Proclus, In Timaeum, 289 f; Seneca, Nat. Quaest. iii. 29, 1.
145_1 Chrysippus, 1187-95. Esse divinationem si di sint et providentia.
145_2 Cicero, De Nat. De. iii. 11, 28; especially De Divinatione, ii. 14, 34; 60, 124; 69, 142. 'Qua ex coniunctione naturae et quasi concentu atque consensu, quam Graeci appellant, convenire potest aut fissum iecoris cum lucello meo aut meus quaesticulus cum caelo, terra rerumque natura?' asks the sceptic in the second of these passages.
145_3 Chrysippus, 939-44. Vaticinatio probat fati necessitatem.
145_4 Chrysippus, 1214, 1200-6.
146_1 Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1903. The MS. is 574 Supplément grec de la Bibl. Nationale. The formulae of various religions were used as instruments of magic, as our own witches used the Lord's Prayer backwards.
146_2 Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, v. 7. They worshipped the Serpent, Nāhāsh ().
147_1 Bousset, p. 351. The hostility of Zoroastrianism to the old Babylonian planet gods was doubtless at work also. Ib. pp. 37-46.
147_2 Or, in some Gnostic systems, of the Mother.
148_1 Harrison, Prolegomena, Appendix on the Orphic tablets.
148_2 Ap. Metamorphoses, xi.
149_1 2 Cor. xii. 2 and 3 (he may be referring in veiled language to himself); Gal. i. 12 ff.; Acts ix. 1-22. On the difference of tone and fidelity between the Epistles and the Acts see the interesting remarks of Prof. P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul, pp. 5 ff.
149_2 Porphyry, Vita Plotini, 23. 'We have explained that he was good and gentle, mild and merciful; we who lived with him could feel it. We have said that he was vigilant and pure of soul, and always striving towards the Divine, which with all his soul he loved. . . . And thus it happened to this extraordinary man, constantly lifting himself up towards the first and transcendent God by thought and the ways explained by Plato in the Symposium, that there actually came a vision of that God who is without shape or form, established above the understanding and all the intelligible world. To whom I, Porphyry, being now in my sixty-eighth year, profess that I once drew near and was made one with him. At any rate he appeared to Plotinus "a goal close at hand." For his whole end and goal was to be made One and draw near to the supreme God. And he attained that goal four times, I think, while I was living with him—not potentially but in actuality, though an actuality which surpasses speech.'
150_1 C. I. G., vol. xii, fasc. 3; and Bethe in Rhein. Mus., N. F., xlii, 438-75.
150_2 Irenaeus, i. 13, 3.
150_3 Bousset, chap. vii; Reitzenstein, Mysterienreligionen, p. 20 ff., with excursus; Poimandres, 226 ff.; Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, pp. 121 ff.
152_1 Eur. fr. 484.
152_2 R. G. E.3, pp. 135-40. I do not touch on the political side of this apotheosis of Hellenistic kings; it is well brought out in Ferguson's Hellenistic Athens, e. g. p. 108 f., also p. 11 f. and note. Antigonus Gonatas refused to be worshipped (Tarn, p. 250 f.). For Sallustius's opinion, see below, p. 223, chap. xviii ad fin.
153_1 Cf. , Democr. 171, Diels, and Alcmaeon is said by Cicero to have attributed divinity to the Stars and the Soul. Melissus and Zeno . The phrase , Diels 651, must refer to some Gnostic sect.
154_1 See for instance Frazer, Golden Bough3, part I, i. 417-19.
154_2 Aesch. Pers. 157, 644 (), 642 (). Mr. Bevan however suspects that Aeschylus misunderstood his Persian sources: see his article on 'Deification' in Hastings's Dictionary of Religion.
154_3 Cf. Aristotle on the , Eth. Nic. 1123 b. 15. . . . . But these kings clearly transgressed the mean. For the satirical comments of various public men in Athens see Ed. Meyer, Kleine Schriften, 301 ff., 330.
155_1 Lysander too had altars raised to him by some Asiatic cities.
156_1 Dittenberger, Inscr. Orientis Graeci, 90; Wendland, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, 1907, p. 74 f. and notes.
157_1 Several of the phrases are interesting. The last gift of the heavenly gods to this Theos is the old gift of Mana. In Hesiod it was , the two ministers who are never away from the King Zeus. In Aeschylus it was Kratos and Bia who subdue Prometheus. In Tyrtaeus it was . In other inscriptions of the Ptolemaic age it is or . In the current Christian liturgies it is 'the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory'. R. G. E.3, p. 135, n. The new conception, as always, is rooted in the old. 'The Gods Saviours, Brethren', &c., are of course Ptolemy Soter, Ptolemy Philadelphus, &c., and their Queens. The phrases , , , are characteristic of the religious language of this period. Cf. also Col. i. 14, ; 2 Cor. iv. 4; Ephes. i. 5, 6.
158_1 Fr. 1118. Arnim. Cf. Antipater, fr. 33, 34, is part of the definition of Deity.
158_2 Plin., Nat. Hist. ii. 7, 18. Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem et haec ad aeternam gloriam via. Cf. also the striking passages from Cicero and others in Wendland, p. 85, n. 2.
159_1 The Stoic philosopher, teaching at Rhodes, c. 100 b. c. A man of immense knowledge and strong religious emotions, he moved the Stoa in the direction of Oriental mysticism. See Schwartz's sketch in Characterköpfea, pp. 89-98. Also Norden's Commentary on Aeneid vi.
160_1 Jacoby in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopädie, vi. 954. It was called .
161_1 Cf. Plotin. Enn. i, ii. 6 .
161_2 Acts xiv. 12. They called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes, because he was .—Paul also writes to the Galatians (iv. 14): 'Ye received me as a messenger of God, as Jesus Christ.'
162_1 Bousset, p. 238.
162_2 Hippolytus, 134, 90 ff., text in Reitzenstein's Poimandres, pp. 83-98.
163_1 Republic, 362 a. is said to = , which is used both for 'impale' and 'crucify'. The two were alternative forms of the most slavish and cruel capital punishment, impalement being mainly Persian, crucifixion Roman.
164_1 See The Hymn of the Soul, attributed to the Gnostic Bardesanes, edited by A. A. Bevan, Cambridge, 1897.
164_2 Bousset cites Acta Archelai 8, and Epiphanius, Haeres. 66, 32.
164_3 Gal. iv. 9; 1 Cor. xv. 21 f., 47; Rom. v. 12-18.
165_1 Cf. Acts xvii. 32.
165_2 Cleanthes, 538, Arnim; Diels, p. 592, 30. Cf. Philolaus, Diels, p. 336 f.
166_1 See especially the interpretation of Nestor's Cup, Athenaeus, pp. 489 c. ff.
167_1 I may refer to the learned and interesting remarks on the Esoteric Style in Prof. Margoliouth's edition of Aristotle's Poetics. It is not, of course, the same as Allegory.
169_1 Published in the Teubner series by William, 1907.
I regret to say that I cannot track this Epicurean 'tetractys' to its source.