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 PAQANISM

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PAQANISM

ally, however, it was thouglu that initiation ensured a happy after-life, and atoned for sins that else had been punished, if not in this life, in some place of expiation (Plato, "Rep.", 366; of. Pindar, Sophocles, Plutarch). These mysteries usually began with the selection of initiandi, their preliminary "baptism", fasting, and (Samothrace) confession. After many sacrifices the RIysteries proper were celebrated, including nearly al- ways a mimetic dance, or "tableaux", showing heaven, hell, purgatory; the soul's destiny; the gods (so in the Isis mysteries. Appuleius (Metamorphoses) tells us his thrilling and profoundly religious experiences]. There was often seen the "passion " of the god (Osiris) : the rape and return of Kore and the sorrows of Demc- ter (Eleusis), the sacred marriage (Here at Cnossus), or divine births (Zeus: Brimos), or renowned inci- dents of the local myth. There was also the "exhibi- tion" of symbolical objects — statues usually kept veiled, mysterious fruits or emblems (Dionysus), an ear of corn (ui)held when Brimos was born). Fi- nally there was usually the meal of mystic foods — grains of all sorts at Eleusis, bread and water in the cult of Mithra, wine (Dionysus), milk and honey (Attis), raw bull's flesh in the Orphic Dionysus-zagreus cult. Sacred formulae were certainly imparted, of magical value.

There is not much reason to think these mysteries had a directly moral influence on their adepts; but their popularity and impressiveness were enormous, and indirectly reinforced whatever aspiration and belief they found to work on. Naturally, it has been sought to trace a close connexion between these rites and Christianity (.\nrich, Pfleiderer). This is inad- missible. Not only was Christianity ruthlessly ex- clusive, but its apologists (Justin, Tertullian, Clement) inveigh loudest against the mysteries and the myths they enshrine. Moreo^'er, the origin of the Christian rites is historically ccrl;iiii fidm our documents. Chris- tian baptism (essentially uniiiue) is alien to the re- peated dippings of the iHiluindi, even to the Taurobo- lium, that bath of bull's blood, whence the dipped emerged renatus in CBlerniim. The totemistic origin and meaning of the sacred meal (which was not a sacri- fice) wherein worshippers communicated in the god and with one another (Robertson Smith, Frazer) is too obscure to be discu.ssed here (cf. Lagrange, "Etudes, etc.", pp. 257, etc.). The sacred fish of Atergatis have nothing to do with the origin of the Eucharist, nor, even probably, with the Ichthys anagram of the cata- combs. (See Fr. J. Dtilger: IXGTS, das Fischsymbol, etc., Rome, 1910. The anagram does indeed repre- sent' l7)iroDs Xpurrbs Qeov 'Ti6s -wT^p, the usual order of the third and fourth words being inverted owing to the familiar formula of the imperial cult; the propagation of thesymbol was often facihtated owing to the popular Syrian fish-cult.) That the terminology of the mys- teries was largely transported into Christian use (Paul, Ignatius, Origen, Clement etc.), is certain; that liturgy (especially of baptism), organization (of the catechumenate), disciplina arcani were affected by them, is highly probable. Always the Church has forcefully moulded words, and even concepts (coittip, i-KKpoivi}^^ ^aiTTttr^s, 0a)Tt(r/x6s, tcX^t-tjs, X670S) to suit her own dogma and its expression. But it were contrary to all likelihood, as well as to positive fact, to suppose that the adogmatic, mythic, codeless practices and traditions of Paganism could subdue the rigid ethic and creed of Christianity. [Consult Cumont, opp. cit. ; Anrich, "Das antike Mysterienwesen, etc." (Gcit- tingen, 1894); O. Pfleiderer, "Das Christenbild, etc." (Berlin, 1903), tr. (London, 190.5). Especially Cabrol, "Orig. liturgiques" (Paris, 1906); Duchesne, "Chris- tian Worship, passim; Blotzer in "Stimmen aus Maria Laach", LXXI, (1900), LXXII, (1907); G. Boissier, "Fin du Paganisme" (Paris, 1907), especially 1, 117 sqq.; "Religion Romaine", passim; Sir S. Dill, op. cit.; C. A. Lobeck, " Aglaophamus " (1829); E.

Rohde, "Psyche" (Tubingen, 1907); J. Reville, "Re- lig. h. Rome, s. 1. Severes" (Paris, 1886); J. E. Harri- son, "Prolegomena" (Cambridge, 1908), especially the appendix; L. R. P'arnell, op. cit., and the lexicons.]

As strange historical phenomena, we note therefore (he coexistence of the highest with the lowest; the sublime tendency, the cxiguum cHnamcn, and the ter- rific catastrophe: human nature buffeted by the crav- ing for divine union, prayer, and purity, and Ijy the sense of sin, the need of penance, and liclplessne.ss of its own powers. Hence, savagery and blood attend the communion-feasts, grotesque myths accompany the loftiest ideals, sensual reaction follows flagellation and fasting. And we admire how, in the Hebrew nation alone, the teleological ascent was constant; so- briety meant no lowered aim; passion implied no frenzy. In the strong grasp of the Christian disci- pline alone, the further antimony of self-abnegation and self-realization was practically and spiritually solved, though theoretically no adequate expression may ever be discovered for that solution. As his- torical problems remain certain connexions yet to be more accurately defined between the "dress" of Christian dogma and rite (whether liturgical, or of formula, or of philosophic category) and the cir- cumambient religions. As historical certainty stands out the impassable gulf, in essence and origin, be- tween the moral and religious systems of contempo- rary Paganism, especially of the Mysteries, and the Christian dogma and rite, formed on Palestinian soil with extraordinary rapidity, and rigidly exclusive of infection from alien sources. [Cf. L. Friedlander, "Roman Life and Manners, etc." (1909-10), espec. Ill, 84-313; O. Seeck, "Gesch. des Unterganges der antiken Welt", I (Berlin, 1910), H (1901), 111 (1909), and appendices, B. Alio, "L'Evangile en face du syncretisme paien " (Paris, 1910). ]

V. Religious PHiLosornY. — This, we suppose, is the highest form of human reaction upon the religious datum of which the soul finds itself in possession, or at least may provide it with the purest, if not the most imperative, mode of worship. From this point of view the older rationalizing cosmogonies (as of Greece) are of little interest to us, save in so far as they witness already to that distinction between Zeus, supreme, and Fate, to which he yet is subject, an earlier unconscious attempt, perhaps, to reconcile the antinomies easily seized by true religious instinct in the popular tradi- tions as to the gods. The mythological cosmogonies of Babylon and Assyria will, how'ever, be of surpassing interest to the "comparative" student of Semitic religions. Noteworthy is the curve of Greek tendency — starting in Ionia, monistic, static, and anti-religious; grown dynamic in Heraclitus, whose Fire will pass, as Logos, into the Stoic system; transferred after the Persian wars to Attica, and profoundly dualized in Plato and Aristotle, whose concepts, however, of World-soul and of the Immanent Nature-force were powerful for all time. Through the Stoics, ex- pressed in terms borrowed consistently from the ex- quisite Egyptian mythology, of Thot, of Osiris, and of Isis, this elaborate system of converging currents is synthesized in Plutarch, while from Plutarch's sources Philo had draw-n the philosophy in which he strove to see the doctrines of Moses, anfl in terms of which he struggled to express the Hebrew books.

Thus was it that the Logos, in theory, impersonal, immanent, blindly evolving in the world, became (transfigured on the one hand by pagan myth, and by too close contact, on the other, with the Angelof Yahweh and the ideals of the Alexandrian sapiential literature) so near to personification, that John could take the expression, mould it to his dogma, cut short all perilous speculation among Christians, and assert once and for all that the Word was made flesh and was Jesus Christ. Yet many of the earlier apologists were to make great trouble with their use of Platonic formu-