Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 11.djvu/429

 PAGANISM

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PAGANISM

Duchesne ["Hist, anpicnne do \'6g\\se", I (Rome, 1908), 640; ef. Sozomen, " Hist, eccl." VII, xx, in P. G., LXVII, 1480] reminds us of the occasional necessary repression: Gregory, writing for Augustine of Canter- bury, fixes the Church's principle and practice (Bede, "Hist, eccl.", I, XXX, xxxii, in P. L., XCV, 70, 72). Reciprocal influence there may to some small extent have been; it must have been slight, and quite possibly felt upon the pagan side not least. All know how Julian tried to remodel a pagan hierarchy on the Christian (P. AUard, " Julien I'Apostat", Paris, 1900).

IV. Morality, Ascesis, My.sticism. — For an ap- preciation of pagan religions in themselves, and for an estimate of their pragmatic value in life, it should be noted that, in proportion as a pagan religion caught glimpses of high spiritual flights, of ecstacy, penance, otherworldliness, the "heroic", it opened the gates of all sorts of moral cataclysms. A frugi retigio was that of Numa: the old Roman in his worship was cautissimus el castissimus. For him, Servus says, re- ligion and fear { = awe) went close together. Pieias was a species of justice (filial, no doubt), but never superslUio. The ordinary man "put the whole of re- ligion in doing thi7igs", veiling his head in presence of the mode.st, featureless numinn, who filled his world and (as their adjective-names show — Vaticanus, Ar- gentarius, Domiduca) presided over each sub-section of his life. Later the Roman virtues, Fides, Castilas, Virtus (manliness), were canonized, but religion was already becoming stereotyped, and therefore doomed to crumble, though to the end the volatile Greeks (rraiSes dti) marvelled at its stability, dignity, and decency. So too the high abstractions of the Gath&s (Moral Law, Good Spirit, Prudent Piety etc., the Amesha-spentas of the Avesta to be — Obedience, Silent Submission, and the rest), especially the enor- mous value set by Persian ethic upon Truth (a virtue dear to Old Rome), witness to lives of sober, quiet citizenship, generous, laborious, unimaginative, just to God and man. Exactly opposite, and disastrous, were the tendencies of the idealistic Hindu, losing himself in dreams of Pantheism, self-annihilation, and divine union. Especially the worship of Vishnu (god of divine grace and devotion), of Krishna (the god so strangely assimilated by modern tendency to Christ), and of Siva (whence Saktism and Tantrism) ran riot into a helpless licence, which must modify, one feels, the whole national destiny. We cannot pass conventional judgments on these aberrations. It is easily conceded that pagans constantly lived better than their creed, or, anyhow, than their myth; blind terrors, faulty premisses, warped traditions originated, preserved, or distorted customs pardonable when we know their history: astounding contradictions co- exist (the ritual murders and prostitution of Assyria, together with the high moral sense revealed in the self- examination of the second Shurpii tablet; the sancti- fied incest and gross myth of Egypt, with the superb negative Confession of the Book of the Dead). Even in Greece, the terrifying survivals of the old clithonic cults, the unmoral influence (for the most part) of the Olympian deities, the unexacting and far more popu- lar cult of local or favourite hero (Herakles, Asklepios), are subordinate to the essential instincts of aldus, Situs, i>i/x«ns (so well analysed by G. Murray, op. cit.), with their taboos and categorical imperatives, reflected back, as by necessity, to the expressed will of God. The religion of the ordinary man is perfectly and fi- nally expressed in Plato's sketch of Cephalus (Re- public, init.), whose instincts and traditions had car- ried him, at life's close, to a goal practically identical with that achieved by the philosophers at the end of their laborious inquiry.

All asceticism is, however, founded on a certain Dualism. In Persia, beyond all others dualist, the fight between Light and Darkness was noble and fruit- ful till it ran out into Manichajism and its debased

allies. Certainly, from the East came much of the mystic Dualism, enjoining penance, focusing atten- tion beyond the grave, preconizing purity of all sorts (even that abstention from thought which leads to ecstacy), which inspired Orphism, Pythagoreanism etc., and transfused the Mysteries. Till Plato, these notions achieved no high literary success. jEschylus preaches a sublime gospel: his austere series — Wealth, Self-sufficiency, Insolence, God-sent Infatuation, Ruin — has echoes of Hebrew prophecy and anticipates the "Exercises"; yet even his stern Spd^avTi TaSeTi' \s calmed into the TraBttv ij.a6oi — a true wisdom, repose, reconciliation. Even in this life Sophocles sees high laws living eternally in serene heaven, a joy for men of obedience. Euripides, in the chaos of his scepticism, lives in angry bewilderment, not knowing where to place his ideal, since Aphrodite and Artemis and the other world-forces are, for him, essentially at war. It is in Plato, far better than in the nihilist asceticisms of the East, that the note — not even yet quite true — of asceticism is struck. The body is our tomb (a-urfia, ir^fia); we must strip ourselves of the leaden weights, the earthy incrustations of life: the true life is an exer- cise in death, a ofiotoKns t(? fle^!, as far as may be; like the swans we sing when dying, "going away to God", whose servants we are; "death dawns", and we owe sacrifice to the Healer-hero for the cure of life's fitful fever; "I have flown away", (the Orphic magic tablets will cry) "from the sorrowful weary wheel" of existences.

Directly after Plato, the schools are coloured by his thought, if not its immediate heirs. Stoic and Epicu- rean really aimed at one thing when they preached their dwddeia and arapa^la, respectively 'Ai'^x"" ™' ajr^x"": be the a.vTdpxvi, master of your self and fate. In Roman days of imperial persecution, this Stoicism, "touched with emotion", pa:ssed into the beautiful, though ill- founded religion of Seneca: all philosophy became practical, an ars vivendi: Life is our ingens negotium, yet not to be despaired of. Heaven is not proud: a^cendentihus di manum porrigent. 'Avu (ppoveiv, ,St. Paul was even then enjoining (Col., iii, 1,2), echoing Plato's rjipovtlv dSdva.Ta Kal Bela (Tim., 90 c), his t^s ivui oSoC ad e^dpxffa (Rep., 621 c), his "life must be a flight" dTrA Tiii- IvBivht fKeicre (.520 A), and Aristotle's doctrine that a man must dBoLvaTetv itj! Saov ivSix^^ai. (Eth. N., X, vii), written so long ago. The more acute expressions of this mystical asceticism were much occupied with the future life and much fostered or provoked by the developed Mysteries. Impossible as it seems to find a race which believed in the extinction of the soul by death, survival was often a vague and dismal affair, prolonged in cavernous darkness, dust, and uncon- sciousness. So Babylon, Assyria, the Hebrews, earlier Greece. Odysseus must make the witless ghosts drink the hot blood before they can think and speak. At best, they depend on human attendance and even companionship; hence certain offerings and human sacrifice on the grave. Or they can, on fixed days, return, harry the living, seek food and blood. Hence expulsion-ceremonies, the Anthesteria, Lemuria, and the like. Kindlier creeds, however, are created, and, at the Cara Cognatio, the souls are welcomed to the places set for them, as for the gods, at the hearth and table, and the family is reconstituted in affection. Hopes and intuitions gather into a full and steady light, even before the inscriptions of the catacombs show that death was by now scarcely reason for tears at all. The "surer bark of a divine doctrine", for which the anxious lad in the "Pha;do" had sighed, had been given to carry souls to that "further shore" to which Vergil saw them reaching yearning hands.

But the Mysteries had already fostered, though not created, the conviction of immortality. They gave no revelations, no new and .secret doctrine, but power- fully and vividly impressed ccitiiiri notions (one of them, immortahty) upon the imagination. Gradu-