A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

CHAPTER III

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS IN LATER ANTIQUITY

 

THOUGH philosophy at its beginning among the Ionians had broken with traditional authority as completely as it has ever done since, religion and free speculation did not cease to interact. In some points, however, their developments were independent. Religious developments independent of philosophy were the establishment and the increased attention paid to the "mysteries," and the importation of new worships from Egypt and Asia Minor. It was also due rather to a new development of religion than to philosophy, that more definite and vivid beliefs came to be popularly held about the immortality of the soul and about future rewards and punishments; though philosophers of religious mind sought to impress these doctrines along with the general conception of a providential government of the universe. In the Homeric poems, the soul goes away to the underworld as soon as the corpse is burnt, and can never afterwards reappear in the word or living men. Yet much later, in the dramatists, the ghost is invoked as still having active powers in this world. Here there is perhaps a survival of a stage of belief more primitive than the Homeric, rather than a development; but in the notion of definite places of reward and punishment there was clearly some growth of belief. Perhaps the mythical treatment of immortality by which Plato follows up his arguments for it on speculative grounds, is more a reaction of older religion on philosophy than an application of philosophy to religion. To the exact truth of the representations given, the philosopher never commits himself, but merely contends that something of the kind is probably true, as against the imaginations in Homer of a world of lifeless shades contrasted in their unreality with the vigor and bloom of life on earth. This side of Plato's teaching had for a long time not much influence. It became influential in proportion as religion revived. With Aristotle and the naturalistic schools, personal immortality almost went out of sight. The Epicureans denied the immortality of the human soul altogether, and with the Stoics survival of consciousness after death, if admitted at all, was only till the end of a cycle or "great year." The religious belief, and especially the belief in Tartarus, became, however, in the end vigorous enough to furnish one point of contact for a new religion that could make it still more definite and terrible. And one side of the new religion was prepared for by the notion, more or less seriously encouraged, that those who partook of the mysteries had somehow a privileged position among the dead. This of course was discountenanced by the most religious philosophers; though they came to hold that it showed a certain want of piety towards ancestral beliefs to make light of initiation into the native mysteries.

Ancient religion and philosophy had not always been on such amicable terms as are implied in this last approximation. Especially at the beginning, when philosophy was a new thing, what may be called a sporadic intolerance was manifested towards it. Indeed, had this not been so, it would be necessary to allow that human nature has since then changed fundamentally. Without such germs of intolerance, its later developments would have been inconceivable. What can be truly said is that the institutions of antiquity were altogether unfavorable to the organization of it. The death of Socrates had political more perhaps than religious motives. It has even been maintained that serious intolerance first appeared in the Socratic school itself. Plato, it is clear, would have been quite willing that an ethical reform of religion should be carried out by force. After the first collision, however, re­igion on the one side remained unorganized, and philosophy on the other side practically free.

How far was popular polytheism taken seriously? That it was not taken seriously by the philosophers is quite evident. Perhaps the Epicureans reacted on it less than any other school; for they conceived of their ethical ideal as realized by the many gods named in mythology, and they had no other divinities. Their quarrel was not with polytheism as such, but with the belief in gods who interrupted their divine tranquility to interfere in the affairs of mortals. The belief of the philosophic schools generally was some form of theism, or, as in the case of the Stoics, pantheism, by which the gods of mythology, if recognized at all, were subordinated to a supreme intelligence or allegorized into natural forces. The later philosophers made use of more elaborate accommodations. Aristotle had rejected polytheism in so many words. Plato had dismissed it with irony. Their successors needed those explicit theories of a rationalizing kind which Plato thought rather idle. For the educated world, both in earlier and later antiquity, Cudworth's position is probably in the main true, that a sort of monotheism was held over and above all ideas of gods and daemons.

Thus the controversy between Christian assailants and pagan defenders of the national religions was not really a controversy between monotheism and polytheism. The champions of the old gods contended only for the general reasonableness of the belief that different parts of the earth have been distributed to different powers, divine though subordinate. And in principle the Christians could have no objection to this. They themselves often held with regard to angels what the pagans attributed to gods; or even allowed the real agency of the pagan gods, but called them "daemons," holding them to be evil beings. The later paganism also allowed the existence of evil daemons, and had a place for angels among supernatural powers. Perhaps there is here a trace of influence from the Eastern gnosis; though Proclus insisted that the name is not peculiar to "the barbarian theosophy," but was applied of old to genuinely Hellenic divinities.

It is often represented as a paradox that the Christian idea of a suffering God should have triumphed over what is supposed to have been the universal prejudice of paganism that to suffer is incompatible with divinity. There is no real paradox. Ideas of suffering gods were everywhere, and the worship of them became the most popular. The case is really this. The philosophers held that absolutely divine beings—who are not the gods of fable—are "impassible." In oratorical apologies for the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, this philosophic view of the divinity had to be met. On the other hand, the Christians made most of their converts among those who were not philosophers. By their mode of appeal, they got the advantage at once of a rigorous monotheism such as philosophy was tending to diffuse, and of the idea that expiations could be performed by incarnate and suffering deities, such as were believed in over all the pagan world. Exactly with this kind of popular paganism philosophy had had its quarrel. Of Xenophanes, the earliest explicitly monotheistic philosopher, it is related that, being asked by the people of Elea whether they should sacrifice to Leucothea and lament for her, he replied: "If you think her a god, do not lament; if human, do not sacrifice." The same view was taken by later philosophers. It was against this, and not against the popular imaginations, that such sayings as the well-known one of Tertullian were directed.

Coinciding with the rise of Christianity there was, as has lately come to be recognized, a revival, not a decline, of ancient religion. The semblance of decline is due to the effect produced on modern readers by the literature of the later Roman Republic and earlier Empire, which proceeded for the most part from the skeptical minority. This impression has been corrected by the evidence of archaeology. So far as there was a real decline in the worship of the old gods, it meant only a desertion of indigenous cults for more exciting ones from the East. First there appeared the cult of the Oriental Bacchus, then of Cybele and of Isis. And all these present curious analogies with Christianity. It is an interesting circumstance that from the Bacchae of Euripides,—which is essentially a picture of the uncontrollable frenzy aroused by devotion to a lately born son of Zeus, persecuted and afterwards triumphant, coming from the East,—many lines were transferred to the Christus Patiens. The neglect of the altars of the gods spoken of by Lucian may be explained by this transfer of devotion. In the dialogue Theon Eklisía, the Hellenic gods are called together with a view to the expulsion of intruding barbarian divinities, such as those that wear Persian or Assyrian garments, and above all "the brutish gods of Nile," who, as Zeus himself is obliged to admit, are a scandal to Olympus. Momus insinuates that the purge will not turn out easy, since few of the gods, even among the Hellenic ones themselves, if they come to be closely examined, will be able to prove the purity of their race. Such an attempt at conservative reform as is here satirized by Lucian no doubt represented what was still the attitude of classical culture in the second century; as may be seen by the invective of Juvenal against the Egyptian religion. Later, the syncretism that took in deities of every nationality came to be adopted by the defenders of classicism. It is this kind of religious syncretism, rather than pure classicism, that revives at the Renaissance. The apology not only for the Greek gods but for those of Egypt, as in truth all diverse representations of the same divinity, is undertaken in one of Bruno's dialogues. What makes this the more remarkable is that Bruno probably got the hint for his Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante precisely from the dialogue of Lucian just referred to.

The nearest approach in the Hellenic world to the idea of a personal religious revelation was made by the philosophic sect of the Pythagoreans. The early history of the sect is mainly the account of an attempt at ethico-political regulation of cities in the south of Italy by oligarchies imbued with the philosophical and religious ideas of Pythagoras. These oligarchies made themselves intensely unpopular, and the Pythagorean associations were violently suppressed. Afterwards remains of the societies combined to form a school specially devoted to geometry and astronomy, and in astronomy remarkable for suggestions of heliocentric ideas. Till we come to the Neo-Pythagoreans of about the first century BC, the history of the school is obscure. Its religious side is observable in this, that those who claim to be of the Pythagorean succession appeal more than other philosophers to the recorded sayings of the founder, and try to formulate a minute discipline of daily life in accordance with his precepts. The writings, mostly pseudonymous, attributed by them to early Pythagoreans are in composition extremely eclectic, borrowing freely from the Stoics as well as from Plato and Aristotle. Coincidences were explained by the assumption that other philosophers had borrowed from Pythagoras. The approach of the Neo-Pythagorean school to the idea of a revelation is illustrated by the circumstance that Apollonius of Tyana, to whom in the first century AD miracles and a religious mission were attributed, was a Pythagorean. The lives of Pythagoras himself, by Porphyry and Iamblichus, are full of the marvels related in older documents from which both alike drew. According to Zeller, the peculiar doctrines and the ascetic discipline of the Essenes are to be ascribed to Neo-Pythagorean rather than to Indian or Persian influences. Their asceticism—an essentially non-Judaic character—has in any case to be explained from a foreign source; and its origin from this particular Hellenic source is on the whole the most probable, because of the number of detailed coincidences both in method of life and in doctrine.

Closely connected with the idea of the cosmical harmony, so strongly accentuated in the Pythagorean school, is the adoration of the stars thought of as animated beings, which became in quite a special manner the philosophic religion. This may have been first suggested by the star-worship associated with the empirical observations of the Chaldeans, from which the Greek rational astronomy arose. There is not much trace of this form of religion in Greek polytheism at its first mythological stage. The genuine gods of Greece were essentially anthropomorphic. In a passage of Aristophanes it is even said that the sun and moon are distinctively the gods of the barbarians. The earliest philosophers did not treat the heavenly bodies as in any special way divine, but regarded them as composed of the same kinds of matter as the other and lower bodies of the universe. When popular religion thought it an impiety on the part of Anaxagoras to explain the nature and action of the sun without introducing divine agency, the divine agency required was no doubt of an anthropomorphic kind,—that of a charioteer for example. By Plato and Aristotle the divinity of the stars themselves was affirmed; and it afterwards became an article of faith with what we may call pagan philosophical orthodoxy. It was for the philosophers a mode of expressing the teleological relation between the supreme Deity and the animated universe. The heavenly bodies, according to the theory, were placed in spheres to give origin by their motions to the ideas of time and number, and to bring about the succession of day and night and the changes of the seasons for the good of men and other animals. That they might do this, they were endowed with ruling intelligences superior to man's and more lasting. For the animating principle of the stars, unimpeded by any process of growth or decay, can energize continuously at its height, whereas human souls, being temporarily united to portions of unstable matter, lapse through such union from the condition of untroubled intellectual activity. This theory, founded by Plato in the Timaeus, was an assertion of teleological optimism against the notion that the stars are products of chance-aggregation. As such, it was defended by Plotinus against the pessimism of the Christian Gnostics, who—going beyond the Epicureans, as he says—regarded the present world as the work of an imperfect or of an evil creator. And in the latest period of the Neo-Platonic school at Athens, a high place was given, among the devotional usages adopted from the older national religions, to those that had reference to the heavenly bodies.

A current form taken by this modification of star-worship was astrology. Its wide dissemination in Italy is known from the edicts expelling the so-called "mathematici" or "Chaldaei," as well as from the patronage they nevertheless obtained at the courts of emperors. Along with magic or Theurgy, it came to be practiced by some though not by all the members of the Neo-Platonic school. Plotinus himself, as a true successor of Plato, minimized where he could not entirely deny the possibility of astrological predictions and of magical influences, and discouraged the resort to them even if supposed real. In his school from first to last, there were always two sections: on the one hand those who, in their attachment to the old religion and aversion from the new, inquired curiously into all that was still preserved in local traditions about human intercourse with gods or daemons; and on the other hand those who devoted themselves entirely to the cultivation of philosophy in a scientific spirit, or, if of more religious mind, aimed at mystical union with the highest God as the end of virtue and knowledge. This union, according to the general position of the school, was in no case attainable by magical practices, which at best brought the soul into relation with subordinate divine powers. According to those even who attached most importance to "theurgy," it was to be regarded as a means of preparation for the soul itself in its progress, not as having any influence on the divinity. One here and there, it was allowed, might attain to the religious consummation of philosophy without external aids, but for the majority they were necessary. As "magical" powers, when real, were held to be due to a strictly "natural" sympathy of each part of the universe with all the rest, and as this was not denied, on scientific grounds, by the opponents of magic, the theoretical difference between the two parties was less than might be supposed. It did not prevent philosophers of opposite views on this point from being on friendly terms with each other. The real chasm was between the philosophers who, however they might aspire after what they had heard of Eastern wisdom, had at heart the continuance of the Hellenic tradition, and those believers in a new revelation who, even if giving to their doctrines a highly speculative form, like the Gnostics, yet took up a revolutionary attitude towards the whole of ancient culture.