The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

To judge of its power, vitality, and chance of permanence, we must look at it under these conditions. And if, when we regard this idolatrous polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders how any moral force could ever overthrow it. At the present time not only are there religions outside of Christianity, but there are also sects within it, so irrational, so devoid of the witness given by internal truth and harmony, so unable to render any account of themselves and their claims which will satisfy a mind looking for consistency, that, regarding them merely as facts, one cannot account for them, yet notwithstanding they may have existed for several hundred years, and had a large share in forming national habits of thought, or even national character; nay, perhaps their secret strength lies in some fold of this character itself. And because they are never seen by themselves, their intrinsic absurdity does not come before their adherents, and the last thing which these think of examining is the foundation of their sect, inasmuch as in fact it has never approached them otherwise than as a condition of their daily life. So we shall understand paganism better by considering it as interwoven with civilisation, polity, and national feelings. We will treat of it briefly under these three heads.

1. First, the whole eastern part of the Roman empire was made up of many various nations having a long and sometimes renowned history, kingdoms, and politics much anterior to Rome herself, of which the Romans had taken violent possession, but wherein remained still the fruits of a rich and undisturbed civilisation. And this word comprehends all the natural life of man, all the discoveries gained by his invention or experience, and accumulated by wealth descending from age to age, all the manifold ties of social intercourse, all the pleasures of the intellect, united, moreover, in their case with an art even now unrivalled in portraying the beauty of the human figure, and in the elegance with which it adapted material forms to the conveniences of life. So rich and varied an inheritance unfolded itself in a thousand Hellenic cities studding the shores of the Mediterranean. The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia. And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. The gods of Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for this world's goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian, Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same thing.

2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship. Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to communicate the worship claimed by the gods.39 Her soil and her worship were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol with the god who dwelt there:

“Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo,Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxumAccolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”

The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome, all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”40 When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease. Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name41 expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative, the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,42 or to suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested; but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness the emperor's genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.

3. But as if these two powers were not ties sufficiently strong to hold polytheism together, there was another feeling distinct from both, which formed its last bulwark. The iron hand which held in its grasp these vast countries, many of them so large that by themselves they might have been empires, was strong enough to prevent or crush insurrection, but provided only the majesty of the Roman peace was accepted, did not seek to disturb a large remnant of local feeling and interest still representing the former life and polity of the several provinces. Now whatever of national, tribe, or race feeling existed, was grouped everywhere about the worship of the native gods.43 The Nile-land had ceased to be a royal seat, and was governed by a simple Roman knight as prefect of the emperor; but not for this had the Nile gods abdicated their dark sway over their votaries. In them the Egyptians still felt that they had something which was their own. Thus, whatever force of patriotism still lurked in the several parts of the empire was nurtured by its own form of polytheism, which it in turn invested with the memories dearest and most ineradicable in man, of past independence or renown. Not only the Egyptians, but the various Asiatic and Libyan races, the Gauls and Germans under Roman sway, were thus attached to their native gods with a feeling no doubt akin to that of the English towards “Old England,” or the Russians towards “Holy Russia.”

4. Two more conditions of society throughout the whole empire we have yet to consider in their bearing on the maintenance of polytheism: first, the concentration of the vast power of the state – in itself an acknowledged omnipotence, without the restriction or reservation of individual rights – in one hand, the hand of the emperor, the sole representative of the people. By this it would seem that all the upper classes of society, the classes at ease as to their maintenance, the classes who have leisure to think and will to act in political matters, were deprived of so much of their freedom, and such deprivation would tend to support an existing institution. Secondly, the despotism above was met by a corresponding despotism below. The rights of the slaveholder over the human labourer left as little margin of freedom to daily toil as the right of the imperial autocrat to the freedom of conscience in the rich. The servants throughout the world of Rome being slaves, were as much in the hand of their masters as those masters were in the hand of the prince.

We can now take a prospect of human society in reference to the polytheism of the empire from the standing-point of Augustus in the last twenty years of his reign. The worship of her gods was so intertwined with the political constitution of Rome from her birth through seven centuries and a half, that it might be said to be one thing with it. Almost as close was the identification of the several religious systems of the East with the enjoyments of civilised life which they prized so highly, and which the empire of Rome secured to them. Further in the background the national gods of the many races included in the empire were the last inheritance of their former independent life. Again, not only was the emperor as Pontifex Maximus the official head of this polytheism, but as representing the whole power of the state, he was its guardian, and whatever assailed it was an insult to the majesty which he embodied; while the slavery in which the masses were lying seemed to represent in human society the chances of war which had all ended in the dominion of Rome and the subjection of the whole pantheon of incongruous gods to the sovereignty of the Capitoline Jupiter. These were general conditions to that multifarious whole of nations and races. Then if Augustus sought to examine more narrowly the society of Roman citizens spread through his empire, he would find it divided very unequally as to numbers into two classes. The vast majority were those who take things as they find them, and who belonged with more or less fidelity and heartiness to the idolatrous polytheism. The worship which came to them as part and parcel of the empire, of civilised and of national life, they accepted without thought. To all these an indefinite number of immoral gods was throned in possession of Olympus; to all these the result of such worship was, as we have seen described by S. Augustine, the utter perversion of morality, the consecration of fables equalling in turpitude the utmost license of the theatres. But everywhere among the educated classes were to be found a small number of sceptical minds: philosophers they termed themselves: it was fashionable to follow some philosophic system or sect, and these fell mainly into two. Now the Epicureans and the Stoics, while they left the existing polytheism in practical possession, as a matter of custom and state religion, and so delivered themselves from any unpleasant consequences of denying the prevailing worship, concurred entirely in this, that the one by the way of atheism, the other by that of pantheism, destroyed all religion of the heart and inner conduct; because they equally removed the notion of a personal God, and its corresponding notion of a personal being in man outliving the body and the world of sense, and meeting with a personal retribution. Whether the power they acknowledge be nature, as in Lucretius, or a hidden physical force running through all nature, which might be called Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, or the name of any other god, as in Marcus Aurelius, the notion of a personal Creator, provident and rewarding, was equally destroyed. Nor before the preaching of the Gospel does there appear a single individual who drew out of the existing polytheism such a conclusion. On the contrary, in Augustus and his successors the imperial idea of unity in religion was to make out that all these systems of polytheism, running into and athwart each other, came practically to the same thing, differing in name only. Their obedience to Jupiter of the Capitol was the only bond of unity, and pledge of the empire's duration, conceived by the Roman rulers.

II. Thus in the time of Augustus no human eye, whether we look at the mass of mankind or the thinking few, could see any sign either that the dominant polytheism was about to fall, or that the lost doctrine of the divine Unity and Personality could be extricated from the bewildering mass of error and superstition which had grown over, disguised, and distorted it. Darker still, if possible, became the prospect under his successor, Tiberius, whose reign had reached the climax of moral debasement, when Sejanus was all-powerful at Rome. Hope for the human race there appeared none, when such an emperor devolved his omnipotence on such a prime minister. Then in the judgment-hall of a procurator in a small and distant eastern province, there passed the following dialogue between an accused criminal and his judge: – “Pilate went into the prætorium again, and called Jesus, and said to him, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee up to me: what hast thou done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from hence.’ Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Art thou a king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’ Pilate saith to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” He who thus declared himself to be a king, the cause of whose birth and advent into the world, the function of whose royalty, was to bear witness to the truth, received from the power which then ruled the world the punishment allotted to the slave who was worthy of death. For many ages a false worship had overshadowed the earth, hiding the true God from men, and setting up instead a multitude of demons for gods. And during this time the thinkers of Greek and Roman society had been asking, What is truth? And now the officer who asked that question of the Truth Himself, replied to it by crucifying Him. And when the body of that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to reign supreme and victorious in the world.

It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined, that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The crucifixion itself – the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered question – was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers, should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on the earth.

For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word, equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word than in Himself… And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself… The Father and the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being generated.”44 Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing – a created copy of the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the indwelling of God's Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation of the soul's own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish instead of filial fear.

But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of the works of the divine art to the Artificer's intention. In this long act of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured, and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.

Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man's person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them, because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.

But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father's Face, the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after God.45 The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.

And this restoration is itself the witness to the Truth of which He spoke before Pilate as the object of His birth and advent. But to make the witness operative and fruitful, the greatest wonder in this list of wonders is required, the suffering of the Truth Himself. He said of the corn of wheat, which was to bear fruit in unnumbered hearts, that it would remain alone unless it fell into the ground and died. And so His crucifixion in the nature which He had assumed was the act from which the renewal of truth went forth; and not only in His Person, but likewise in His chosen witnesses this special mode of vivifying the truth, and making it fruitful, should be repeated. Not only must the absolute Truth of God appear in our nature itself in order to be accepted, but the nature in which it appeared should offer the sacrifice of itself; and this particular mode of propagating the truth should be observed in that chosen band whom He termed specially His witnesses. Their witness should be their suffering; in them too the Truth should be crucified, and so become fruitful.

And as man in his original creation had been a copy, however faint, of the eternal relations of the Godhead in itself, so his restoration springs from those same eternal relations. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are seen working.46 It springs from the Father, in that He is the Father of the only-begotten Son, the Original of the Image, and so the Father of all those who are the copies of that Image. It springs from the Son, in that He is the perfect Image of the Father, and by dwelling in a created nature has raised it to the dignity of His Person, from which the grace of Sonship comes. It springs from the Holy Spirit, whose work as the Spirit of the Father and the Son is to imprint the copy of the Son on man. He performs in every one of the redeemed by communicating to them a participation of the divine nature, by dwelling in them, by contact and coherence with them, a work infinitely less in degree, but yet of the same order with that work of His whereby all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt by personal unity in our Lord's Manhood.47

But we left our Lord before Pilate, bearing witness to the truth. It remains to see how that truth became impressed on the world.

Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man

“Totus Christus caput et corpus est. Caput unigenitus Dei Filius, et corpus ejus Ecclesia, Sponsus et Sponsa, duo in carne una.” S. Aug. de Unitate Ecc. tom. ix. 341.

“Totus Christus, id est, caput et membra.” S. Thomas, Prolog. ad 1 Sentent. art. 4.

Let us look back on the space which we have traversed, and gather up in a few words the sight which it presents to us. We have man before us as far as history will carry us back, as far as reasoning, planting itself on the scanty traces of history, will penetrate into the cloudland of prehistoric times: and the result stands before us exhibited in the manifold records still remaining of the most renowned ancient civilisation. Here, then, we see nations whose genius, whether in history, poetry, and literature, or in works of art, or in civil government, we still admire, comprising men in many of whom the powers of reason reached their utmost limit; nations inhabiting the most varied climates and countries, and amongst them the fairest in the world, nations formed under the most different circumstances and pursuing the most distinct employments, some agricultural, some commercial, some inland, some nautical, but alike in this, that they were enthralled by systems of a false worship, of which it is hard to say whether it was the more revolting to the reason by its absurdity, or to the conscience of man by its foulness. And this false worship does not lie distinct and apart from the concerns of daily civil and domestic life, but is intertwined with all the public and private actions of men, forming their habits and ruling their affections. Moreover, the polytheistic idolatry described above as existing at the time of Augustus in every province of his empire except one, in almost48 every country which touched upon it, or was known to it, is the result, the summing-up, the embodiment of man's whole history up to that time, so far as we know it: it is that into which this history had run out, its palpable, it almost seemed its irresistible, form. And it amounts to a complete corruption, first of the relation between man and his Creator, secondly of the relation between man and his fellow, thirdly of the relations of man in civil government, that is, of states and political communities, to each other.