Chapter 37. Oriental Religions in the West.
THE WORSHIP of the Great Mother of the Gods and her lover or
son was very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove
that the two received divine honours, separately or conjointly, not
only in Italy, and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces,
particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and
Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity by
Constantine; for Symmachus records the recurrence of the festival
of the Great Mother, and in the days of Augustine her effeminate
priests still paraded the streets and squares of Carthage with
whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait, while, like the
mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged alms from the
passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody orgies of the
Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found little favour.
The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic
excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity
of the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler
rites of Adonis. Yet the same features which shocked and repelled
the Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans
and barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were
mistaken for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory
of a new birth and the remission of sins through the shedding of
blood, have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally
appealed to peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong.
Their true character was indeed often disguised under a decent
veil of allegorical or philosophical interpretation, which probably
sufficed to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic worshippers,
reconciling even the more cultivated of them to things which
otherwise must have filled them with horror and disgust. 1
The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of
crude savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a
multitude of similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of
paganism spread over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the
European peoples with alien ideals of life gradually undermined the
whole fabric of ancient civilisation. Greek and Roman society was
built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the
community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the
commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of
the individual whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained
from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives
to the public service and were ready to lay them down for the
common good; or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never
occurred to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring
their personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was
changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the
communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the
only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the
prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into
insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral
doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the
public service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual
emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which
he regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The
saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic
contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest
ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero
who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his
country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men
whose eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of
heaven. Thus the centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the
present to a future life, and however much the other world may
have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by
the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The
ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of
society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and
thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible
through the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness
to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men
refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In
their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they
were content to leave the material world, which they identified with
the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted
for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian
philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle
Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and
conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the
march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had
turned at last. It is ebbing still. 2
Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the
ancient world competed against each other for the allegiance of the
West was the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of
his worship is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which
have been found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire.
In respect both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears
to have presented many points of resemblance not only to the
religion of the Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity. The
similarity struck the Christian doctors themselves and was
explained by them as a work of the devil, who sought to seduce the
souls of men from the true faith by a false and insidious imitation of
it. So to the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the
native heathen rites appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the
Christian sacraments. With more probability the modern student of
comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and
independent workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude,
attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his little
life to its awful mysteries. However that may be, there can be no
doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to
Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after
moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the
conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in
the balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in
our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have
borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the
twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it
was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to
lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that
turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to
have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The
celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight
they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth! The light
is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born sun by
the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice,
they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the
Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of
December was the great Oriental goddess whom the Semites called
the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic
lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly
identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun,
as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of
December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth,
and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time,
however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of
January as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of
commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually
spread until by the fourth century it was universally established in
the East. But at the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth
century the Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth
of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of
December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted
also by the Eastern Church. At Antioch the change was not
introduced till about the year 375 A.D. 3
What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute
the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated
with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. "The
reason," he tells us, "why the fathers transferred the celebration of
the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It was
a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of
December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in
token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians
also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church
perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they
took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be
solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth
of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has
prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth." The heathen origin of
Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine
when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn
day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him
who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the
pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because of the birth
of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of the nativity of
Christ. 4
Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the
birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to
transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was
called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no
intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same sort
may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter
festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of
the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the
same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in Greece, Sicily,
and Southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to
the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the Church may
have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen
predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this
adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than
in the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of
Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have
made little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never
formed part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might
have taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by
the similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great
Mother. Now the death and resurrection of Attis were officially
celebrated at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March,
the latter being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as
the most appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who
had been dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to
an ancient and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the
twenty-fifth of March, and accordingly some Christians regularly
celebrated the Crucifixion on that day without any regard to the
state of the moon. This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia,
Cappadocia, and Gaul, and there seem to be grounds for thinking
that at one time it was followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition
which placed the death of Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was
ancient and deeply rooted. It is all the more remarkable because
astronomical considerations prove that it can have had no
historical foundation. The inference appears to be inevitable that
the passion of Christ must have been arbitrarily referred to that date
in order to harmonise with an older festival of the spring equinox.
This is the view of the learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr.
Duchesne, who points out that the death of the Saviour was thus
made to fall upon the very day on which, according to a
widespread belief, the world had been created. But the resurrection
of Attis, who combined in himself the characters of the divine
Father and the divine Son, was officially celebrated at Rome on the
same day. When we remember that the festival of St. George in
April has replaced the ancient pagan festival of the Parilia; that the
festival of St. John the Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen
midsummer festival of water: that the festival of the Assumption of
the Virgin in August has ousted the festival of Diana; that the feast
of All Souls in November is a continuation of an old heathen feast
of the dead; and that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to
the winter solstice in December because that day was deemed the
Nativity of the Sun; we can hardly be thought rash or unreasonable
in conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of the Christian
church-the solemnisation of Easter-may have been in like manner,
and from like motives of edification, adapted to a similar celebration
of the Phrygian god Attis at the vernal equinox. 5
At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that
the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death and
resurrection should have been solemnised at the same season and
in the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of
Christ at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently
Rome, that is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis either
originated or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the
coincidence as purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season
at which in the temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies
to a fresh outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as
the time when the world was annually created afresh in the
resurrection of a god, nothing could be more natural than to place
the resurrection of the new deity at the same cardinal point of the
year. Only it is to be observed that if the death of Christ was dated
on the twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according to
Christian tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of
March, which is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the
Julian calendar and the resurrection of Attis. A similar displacement
of two days in the adjustment of Christian to heathen celebrations
occurs in the festivals of St. George and the Assumption of the
Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius
and perhaps by the practice of the Church in Gaul, placed the
death of Christ on the twenty-third and his resurrection on the
twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his resurrection coincided
exactly with the resurrection of Attis. 6
In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous
Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians
and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence
between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and
that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between
the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the
resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of
Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the
resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection
of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a
superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their
god was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the
counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its
copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They
admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity,
but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back
on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had
surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. 7
Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the
heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental.
They mark the compromise which the Church in the hour of its
triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still
dangerous rivals. The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive
missionaries, with their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had
been exchanged for the supple policy, the easy tolerance, the
comprehensive charity of shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly
perceived that if Christianity was to conquer the world it could do
so only by relaxing the too rigid principles of its Founder, by
widening a little the narrow gate which leads to salvation. In this
respect an instructive parallel might be drawn between the history
of Christianity and the history of Buddhism. Both systems were in
their origin essentially ethical reforms born of the generous ardour,
the lofty aspirations, the tender compassion of their noble
Founders, two of those beautiful spirits who appear at rare intervals
on earth like beings come from a better world to support and guide
our weak and erring nature. Both preached moral virtue as the
means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object
of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a
curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity,
the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the
austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply
opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of
humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small
number of disciples, who consistently renounced the ties of the
family and the state in order to work out their own salvation in the
still seclusion of the cloister. If such faiths were to be nominally
accepted by whole nations or even by the world, it was essential
that they should first be modified or transformed so as to accord in
some measure with the prejudices, the passions, the superstitions
of the vulgar. This process of accommodation was carried out in
after ages by followers who, made of less ethereal stuff than their
masters, were for that reason the better fitted to mediate between
them and the common herd. Thus as time went on, the two
religions, in exact proportion to their growing popularity, absorbed
more and more of those baser elements which they had been
instituted for the very purpose of suppressing. Such spiritual
decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at the level of its
great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to
ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual
divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive
patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by their glorification
of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the
root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow
was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of
mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls
with the certainty of extinguishing the species. 8