The Shining Pyramid (collection)/Paganism

In a certain company a man once read out some verses from an old hymn. Lest the character of the assembly should be mistaken, it must be said at once that the hymn was not read from a hymn-book, but from an "anthology," which makes all the difference. These are some of the lines that were read:

Many other verses as beautiful as these were read, and when the poem was ended one of the hearers said it was wonderful, "but absolutely pagan." He did not speak in the sense of Mr. Pecksniff on Sirens—"pagan, I regret to say"—he meant that the Christian poet was using imagery to which he had no title, that he was attempting to gild and beautify the dull Christian heaven with all the lovely apparatus of paganism, with the scenic ornament which properly belonged to the world that had not grown grey with the breath of the Galilean. He wished to imply that the writer was like a gentleman standing outside the door of a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon gathering and trying to get you in on the false pretence that the Rite of the Cyprian—if not of the Lampsacene—would be celebrated at 3:30 sharp. Strange to say, there rose no argument on this matter; but I have been wondering ever since that evening how Sylvanus got his notion that beautiful, sensuous images are the peculiar property of paganism as opposed to Christianity; that Christianity, regarded from the high, æsthetic standpoint, is a grim, grey business, chiefly bent on making everybody very uncomfortable by purely negative ethics. I am afraid that "When the wicked man" and "Dearly beloved brethren" have something to do with this misconception. I am sure that Puritanism, with its record of ugliness and general beastliness—see Sir Walter Scott for the use of the latter term—has had a great deal to do with it. But it really is a misconception. To begin with a book which has always been recognised as of palmary authority in Christian Mysticism, is there any more splendid instance of the use of sensuous imagery than that afforded by the Song of Songs? Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

And, again, in a very different writer one finds such verses as

O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.

And in another Prophet we have

I will be as the dew unto Israel. He shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon. They that dwell under his shadow shall return. They shall revive as the corn and grow as the vine. The scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon.

The glowing and jewelled splendours of the Apocalypse are too well known to be cited here. So again I wonder at the misconception of the man who thought the imagery of the old hymn "pagan" because it was beautiful and sensuous. For the fact is that the Christian mythos is remarkable for its constant and lavish use of all such imagery. The foundations of the Heavenly Syon are of precious stones, and the very splendour of the Divine Presence is shown forth in the symbol of jewels:

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.

So it is in strict accordance with this sacramental and symbolic and sensuous system that the public service of the Christian Church was devised, following the precedent of the Jewish Ritual. It has been already pointed out by an ingenious writer that those who wish to get the true "pagan effect" must go to Mass, for where else in these days can they see the garlands of flowers, the curtained shrines, the holy images, the burning torches, the aspiring cloud of incense, the vested hierophants, the white dance of the procession? Where else can they hear the music that invokes the gods? And from what has been said it seems clear enough that the modern sects which dispense either in thought or word or deed with this system of sensuous symbolism on one pretext or another have no real title to be called Christians at all. Their religion has lost its "body," as it were, it has be come a thin, grey spectre; a ghost, but by no means ghostly, in the old English sense of the term. And for the banishing of this evil, menacing, and ghastly "spook" of true religion it were earnestly to be desired that some all-potent exorcist could be discovered, so that the unclean thing could be dismissed for ever and sent to the depths of the Red Sea!

But there is another error of comparison between Christianity and paganism; an error perhaps commoner than the one that I have noted, almost deserving to be placed in the Academic List of Vulgar Errors. This latter misconception is to the effect that, whereas good Christians are obliged to live very strict lives, good pagans could do exactly as they pleased. This is the laurel, doves, Pæan, and "breasts of the nymph in the brake" view celebrated by Mr. Swinburne. I suppose many people think of paganism as of one long revel; of the faithful pagans as continually engaged in their religious duties of crowning themselves—and everything—with roses, of singing odes in honour of the Nymphs and the Graces, of drinking Falernian wine, and of—well—enjoying themselves in other agreeable fashions. The pagan world is imagined as a vast Abbey of Thelema, where everybody did exactly as he liked, where there were no morals and no rules, and no such words as "no" or "you mustn't" were ever heard. Now, perhaps, I shall be a petra scandali and a lapis offensionis to some of my friends, but I must say that I believe that there was very little difference between the average "morals" of an average Greek village in the fifth century before Christ and the average "morals" of an English village of to-day. I say "average" advisedly, since it is my belief that the Catholic Faith offers to those who choose it the clear way of a high sanctity, which the antique Greek faith hardly, or but dimly, dreamed of; and sanctity presupposes a super-morality, an ethic exalted to an infinite power. The beautiful little tale of "Daphnis and Chloe" belongs to a much later period than that which I have mentioned; but I expect that there are many English parish priests who would be glad if their young people were, on the whole, as innocent as were Daphnis and his Chloe. And if we consider that our villagers have far clearer and more authoritative counsels and guides to follow than had these two charming lovers, I think we shall agree that Devonshire and Norfolk do not altogether shine by the comparison with old Greece. To put the matter shortly—the farmyard was no more the model of the decent Greek than it is of the decent Englishman. No doubt some of the Greek village ceremonies would have sent an English drawing-room into fits and strong convulsions; but an English drawing-room is not the Holy Father, nor is it a General Council; its decree, "We are exceedingly shocked," is not of faith. It would, of course, be simple enough to construct a paganism of the rosy-wine order out of the bad behaviour of vicious people in big cities at a late period, but then these people were not in any true sense pagans. They were atheist debauchees, a class which has abounded in every corrupt and decadent civilisation; but it would be hard enough if we were to judge our own ages of faith by the conduct of the worst people in modern London and Paris, and so one must not take M. Louys's "Aphrodite" as a faithful presentation of pagan life and morals. And even in this late time, even in a much later time, when Apuleius wrote his Twelve Books of Metamorphoses, commonly called The Golden Ass, there were not wanting witnesses to high and ascetic virtue in paganism itself. The ending of the story, which shows how the redeemed Lucius became a vowed priest of some Egyptian cultus, has its note of austerity and purification and solemn ritual observance; there is much more in these last pages than the doctrine of the nymph in the brake and wine and flowers, and do as you like all the day long.

But when one leaves these periods of corruption and decay and practical atheism and goes back to the really representative time of old Greece, the time when the great Greek literature was being produced, it is really difficult to conceive how this utterly nonsensical idea of universal libertinism can have arisen. Let any one read the plays of Æschylus and Sophocles, and he will see how far were the true ideals of old Greece from that silly Pantomime Transformation Scene, all artificial flowers and red limes and bare legs, that some of us have devised for ourselves. The doom of fated houses, the doom of pride, the doom of that satanic arrogance that could defy heaven itself, the doom of the Great King who trusted in his hosts and in their arms, the awful decrees of destiny—these were the topics of the dramatists, and one cannot very well conceive that the ears of a race of idle and sensual voluptuaries to whom morals were unknown would be tickled with such austere and dread discourse as this. The great white theatre with the sky above it, the thousands of citizens assembled, the actors "buskined" to more than human height, masked so that no impertinence of mere human emotion should by chance be visible, chanting in a measured song, so that the inadequacy of mere "dramatic" expression should not spoil the great work; beneath them the white chorus solemnly revolving in an antique dance about the altar of the god, chanting also in a monotonous, church-like mode; and a blind Œdipus vanishing away at last into the Holy Grove, into the spiritual world of healing and redemption—all these things make up a picture of old Greece that is strangely different from the Rosy Lubberland of our Neo-pagans. If one wanted to describe the Attic Drama in a phrase, one might call it the Doctrine of Predestination set to slow music. It would seem, indeed, that a race which could imagine the Avenging Furies possessed of necessity the notion of right and wrong; and, needless to say, this conclusion is supported by evidence of all kinds, and from all quarters. And, quite by the way, it must be remembered that Plato and Aristotle were somewhat serious people, who are still not without influence in the serious thought of the world.

And there is another consideration which disposes of the popular idea of paganism as mere unregulated sensuality. Mr. Andrew Long has shown with varied learning and much eloquence that the Greek Mythology and Ritual are barbarous Mythology and Ritual as developed and beautified by a people of high æsthetic gifts; he has shown that we may see the rude origins of classic religion still surviving amongst Australian Blackfellows and suchlike peoples. Whence follows more than might appear; it follows that the Greek was ruled and governed and hemmed in by a complicated and wide-spreading net of observances, of purifications, of ritual customs, of taboos and commands; all of which things were in the way of his doing exactly as he liked all day long. It is agreed by those who know the barbarous races of these days that if such peoples have a different morality and a different code from ours, at least that morality and that code are most rigidly observed; neither a Blackfellow nor a negro can do what he likes under all circumstances. No doubt these, like the Ancient Greeks, have licenses of which we should not approve; but, on the other hand, wild Australia and Central Africa and old Greece have and had laws and observances, prohibitions and ordinances which would have seemed minutely oppressive to a seventeenth-century Scotch Presbyterian. In the old paganism (as in that which survives to-day amongst savages) there were initiations painful to the body and awful to the spirit: before a man was allowed to experience pleasure he was required to prove that he was able to suffer anguish bravely and patiently.

On the whole I am inclined to think that many of those who now praise paganism would not have been really happy if they had lived in Athens. And as for Sparta!