ENGLISH DOOR

THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

CHAPTER III.

PAGANISM.

In the fifth century Paganism, at first sight, seemed but a ruin. It is commonly supposed that the fall of superstition was imminent before the preaching of the Gospel, and that Christians have claimed an easy miracle in the destruction of an old cult which had long tottered beneath the blows of philosophy and the popular reason. Yet eighty years after the conversion of Constantine Paganism survived, and a greater lapse of time, a stronger expenditure of effort, was required to dispossess the ancient religion of the Empire, still mistress of the soil through its temples, of society through its associations, of some higher souls by the little truth it held, of the mass by the very excess of its errors.

When the Emperor Honorius, in 404, celebrated his sixth consulate at Rome, the poet Claudian, charged with the task of doing public honour to the heir of so many Christian emperors, invited him to recognize in the temples which surrounded the imperial palace his heavenly body guard, and pointed to the sanctuary of the Tarpeian Jove which crowned the Capitol, and the sacred edifices which rose on every side toward the sky, upholding on their pediments a host of gods to preside over the City and the World. We cannot accuse the poet of reviving in hyperbole the lustre of an extinct Paganism. Several years later a topogra­phical survey of Rome, in numbering the monuments which the sword and fire of the Goths had spared, still counted forty-three temples and two hundred and eighty chapels. The Colossus of the Sun, a hundred feet in height, still reared its front by the side of the Flavian amphitheatre, which had reeked with many a martyr’s blood. Statues of Minerva, Hercules, and Apollo decorated the squares and cross streets, and the fountains still gushed under the invocation of the nymphs. Time had gone by filled with the spirit of Christianity, the era of St. Augustine and of St. Jerome, but in 419, under Valentinian III, Rutilius Numatianus still sang of the pagan city as mother of heroes and of gods. “Her temples,” said he, “bear us nearer to heaven.” It is true that imperial edicts had closed the temples and forbidden the sacrifices, but the continued renewal of these laws during fifty years shows their constant infringement. In the midst of the fifth century the sacred fowls of the Capitol were still fed, and the consuls, on entering office, demanded their auspices. The Calendar noted the pagan festivals side by side with the feasts of the Saviour and the Saints. Within the City and beyond, throughout Italy and the Gallic provinces, and even the entire Western Empire, the sacred groves were still untouched by the axe, idols were adored, altars were standing, and the pagan populace, believing alike in the eternity of their cult and of the Empire, were waiting in scornful patience till mankind grew weary of the folly of the cross.

Hitherto, indeed, the fortunes of Rome had seemed mingled with those of her gods, and from the three great eras of her history had been gradually evolved the pagan system which we remark in the fifth century. The kingly epoch had furnished the antique dogmas on which reposed the whole theology of Rome. Supreme over all things stood an immutable power, unknown and nameless; beneath were other deities known to men, but perishable in nature, borne along towards a fatal revolution which was to destroy the universe and raise it up anew; lower still came souls, emanations of the Deity, but fallen and doomed to an expiation on earth and in hell, until they became worthy of a return to their first abode. A close com­merce between the visible and invisible worlds was in consequence maintained through the media of auguries, sacrifices, and the worship paid to the Manes. Rome herself was a temple in near relation to heaven and hell, square in form, facing towards the East, according to the ancient rites. Each patrician’s house was a sanctuary, wherein the ancestral images from their place of honour watched over the fortunes of their descendants. The laws of the City, hallowed by the auspices, expanded into oracles, magistracies became sacerdotal, every important act in life a reli­gious transaction. A people so permeated with respect for their gods and their ancestors, under their eyes as was the firm conviction in council or in war, was fit for great achievements. These obscure but potent doctrines had disciplined the old Romans, and sustained the edifice of the commonwealth; as the cloacae of Tarquin, those sombre but gigantic vaults, had purified the soil of the City and supported its monu­ments.

Doubtless the Greek mythology modified the austerity of this primitive belief. It had, however, appeared during the most flourishing ages of the republic, with the first examples of that bold policy which was to advance by enlarging the circle of its law and of its worship, and receive into the bosom of Rome the con­quered nations and their gods. The divinities of Greece followed the car of Paulus-Emilius and of Scipio to the Capitol; but though the victor descended when his hour of triumph was past, the captive gods remained to attract every art around their shrines. Sculptors and poets reared an Olympus of marble and gold in place of the deities of clay to which the old Romans had done homage. Religion lost her power over morality, but over the imagination she reigned supreme. At length the advent of the Caesars opened Rome to the worship of the East. As the respect for primitive traditions was withering away, so society, rather than remain godless, sought new idols at the world’s extremity. It was in Isis and Serapis, in Mithra and his mysteries, that troubled hearts now sought repose. Vespasian and his successors have been often blamed for their sanction to the barbarous rites which the Senate had for long contemptuously repelled, but the emperors did but renew the old. policy, and as sovereign pontiffs of a city which boasted of giving peace to the world, it was their duty to reconcile all religions. They realized the ideal of polytheism, in which there was room for all the false gods, but no place for the True.

Thus was that mighty religion rooted in the history, the institutions, the very stones of Rome; and, in jus­tice to Paganism, it had stronger ties in the ‘souls of men, for the ancient society would never have survived so many ages had it not possessed some of those truths which the human conscience never entirely lacks. The Roman religion placed one supreme deity above all secondary causes ; he was proclaimed upon his temples as very good and very great. The feciales called him to witness before hurling the dart which carried with it peace or war. The poet Plautus showed the messen­gers of this god visiting cities and nations to procure “written in a book the names of those who sustained wicked lawsuits by false witness, and of those who per­jured themselves for money; how it is his task to be judge of appeal in badly judged causes, and if the guilty think to gain him by presents and victims, they lose at once their money and their trouble.” Such language was that of a poet rather than a philosopher, but it was addressed to the mob, and gained their applause in touching, like so many nerves, the group of beliefs which lay at the root of the public conscience. It was mindful also of the dead, and had touching prayers in their behalf. “ Honour the tombs, appease the souls of your fathers. The Manes ask for little: to them devotion stands in the place of rich offerings.” Expiatory sacrifices for ancestors were handed down as a charge upon the inheritance from father to son, cere­monies whose power was to be felt in hell, to hasten the deliverance of souls who were undergoing purgation, and bring the day in which they were to seat themselves as its tutelary deities around the family hearth. The whole funeral liturgy bore witness to faith in a future life, to the reversibility of merits, to the solidarity of the family organization. The thought of a God and remembrance of the dead were as two rays, unkindled by philosophy but proceeding from a higher Source, with capacity of still guiding, after the lapse of ages of pagan darkness, some chosen spirits in the right way; so they throw light on the obstinate resistance offered to Christianity by some honest but timid souls, who answered, like Longinian, to the arguments of St. Au­gustine, that they hoped to reach God by way of the old observances, and through the virtues of antiquity.

But that small and well-meaning band judged wrongly of the religion whose doomed altars they were defend­ing. If Paganism possessed elevating influences, so also did elements exist in Chaos. Side by side with doctrines which might have sustained life in the indi­vidual intellect and in society, a principle was working which must ever impel towards ruin the person of man and civilization itself. The evil leaven of heathenism laboured to extinguish reason in man by separating it from the supreme truth whence all its light is derived. Whereas religion is bound to strain every nerve in snatching the human soul from the distractions of sense, to give it an upward flight in raising the veils which hang over the spiritual world, Paganism diverted it from the sphere of ideas by promising to find its god in the regions of sense. It pointed, firstly, to Him in Matter itself, whose hidden forces it bade the faithful to deify. The Romans adored the water of their fountains, stones, serpents, and the accustomed fetishes of the barbarian. Mankind till then had paid honour to an unknown power, conceived to be greater than himself; his second and more culpable error lay in adoring himself, in deifying that humanity which he recognized as weak and sinful. The priests, sculptors, and poets of Paganism borrowed for their gods not only the features but the frailties of mortals, and thence rose the fables which throned in heaven the passions of earth; thence came the whole system of idolatry hardly to be realized in the intensity of its madness. It was no calumny of Christian apologists, but the avowal of the wise ones of the old cult, that the idols were as bodies into which the powers of heaven de­scended when conjured by the prescribed rites; that they were held captive there by the smoke of victims, nourished by their fat smeared upon the statues, their thirst slaked when priests poured over them cupfuls of gladiatorial blood. Men of sober reason spent whole days in paying to the Jupiter of the Capitol the homage which as clients they owed to a patron—some in offering him perfumes, others in introducing visitors or declaiming comedies to him. But Rome began to crave for a more concrete God than the Capitolian Jove, and found a living and most terrible deity in the person of her Emperor. Earth could offer nothing more divine in the sense of a majesty at once recognized and obeyed, and Paganism did but push its principles to their con­sequence in deifying the Caesars; but reason fell to the lowest depth of degradation, and the Egyptians gro­velling before the beasts of the Nile outraged humanity less than the age of the Antonines, with its philoso­phers and jurisconsults rendering divine honours to the Emperor Commodus.

Again, Paganism perverted the Roman will by turn­ing it from the supreme good by means of the two passions—fear and desire. Man craves for God, and yet dreads Him, as he fears the dead, the life to come, and all invisible things. Drawn irresistibly towards Him, he takes flight and avoids His very Name, and the fear which severs him from his last end is the chief cause of all his aberrations. At first sight, Paganism seemed a mere religion of terror, which in disfiguring the idea of God, only made Him more obscure, more threatening, more crushing to the imagination of man. Nature, which it proposed as an object of adoration, seemed but a third force, governed by no law, subject only to the tremendous caprices which revealed them­selves in the lightning flash and the earthquake, or the volcanic phenomena of the Roman Campagna. Amidst the thirty thousand deities with which he had peopled the world, the Roman, far from being confident in their protection, was full of disquietude. Ovid represents the peasantry assembled before the image of Pales, and the following is the prayer which he makes them utter:—

“ O goddess, appease for us the fountains and their divinities, appease the gods dispersed in the forest depths ; grant that we may meet no Dryads, nor Diana surprised at the bath, nor Faunus, when towards mid­day he tramples the herbage of our fields.”

If the bold peasants of Latium thus shrank from an encounter with wood-nymphs, it is no marvel that they adored Fever and Fear. This feeling of terror permeated the entire religion, and gave rise to numberless sinister rites, and the machinery in sight of which Lucretius might well say that fear alone had made the gods. It produced those frenzies of magic which were but a despairing effort of man to resist these cruel deities, and conquer them not by the moral merits of prayer and virtue, but by the physical force of certain acts and fixed formulas. There is no sight stranger but more instructive than of that system of incantation and senseless observance by means of which earth’s wisest race sought to lay nature in fetters; but which sooner or later burst most terrible in power through its bonds, and took vengeance on man through death. As, then, death remained the ultimate ruler of the heathen world, so human sacrifice was the last effort of the pagan liturgy. It was principally by the infernal gods, by the souls of ancestors wandering pale and attenuated around their burial-place, that blood was demanded. Under Tarquin the First, children were sacrificed to Maria, the mother of the Lares. In the brightest age of the re­public and of the empire, a male and female Gaul and a pair of Greeks were buried alive to avert an oracle which had promised the soil of Rome to the barba­rians; the spell pronounced over the heads of the victims devoted them to the gods of hell; and Pliny, a contemporary of these cruelties, was only struck by the majesty of the ceremonial, and the force of its for­mulas. When Constantine, and with him Christianity, had mounted the imperial throne, the pagan priests still offered, year by year, a cup of blood to Jupiter Latialis. Vainly did the Romans forbid to their conquered nations the slaughter of which they gave the example, and in the third century human sacrifice still lingered in Africa and Arcadia, as if all the laws of civilization were powerless to stifle the brutish instincts which Paganism let loose in the depths of man’s fallen nature.

But mankind, in flying from the true good, followed one which was false. The terror which drove him from God plunged man into lustful indulgence, and the religion of fear became the sanction of carnal pleasure. We must glance at the excesses of this error, if only to disabuse the minds who, repelled by the sternness of the Gospel, turn regretfully to antiquity, asking in what respect the Roman civilization was inferior to that of Christian times. Though Nature is constantly affording a spectacle of decay, she is prodigal also in the prin­ciple of life. She shows man that same power which exists in him for the perpetuation of his race and is open to be abused by him to his loss, and exhales from every pore a dangerous spell, as it were, which is liable to cause him to forget his spiritual destinies. Far from guarding man therefrom, Paganism plunged his being into the intoxications of sense, and brought him to adore the propagating principle in nature. Phidias and Praxiteles were the servants of its brilliant worship, and an obscene symbol was selected as a summary of its mysteries. The feasts of Bacchus saw it led in procession through the towns and villages of Latium, amidst ceremonies in which matrons of noble birth played their part. Songs and pantomime accompanied the rite, and robbed the women who joined in it of all excuse on the score of ignorance of its meaning; and though these infamies have been veiled by the name of symbolism, doubtless where the priests placed symbols, the populace found incentives and examples. The gods were honoured by imitation, and their adulteries served to reassure the consciences which scrupled. At length, from venerating love as the life-principle which circu­lated in nature, they came to deify the nameless lusts by which nature itself is outraged, and the immolation of beauty and modesty ranked as the worthiest tribute to the apotheosis of the flesh. Prostitution became a religion, and its temples at Cyprus, at Samos, and at Mount Eryx, were served by thousands of courtesans. Lust also claimed its human victims, and terror and passion, the twin scourges of the old society, drove man­kind to the same abyss. Far distant from the supreme good, man had deified the two forms of evil, destruction and corruption, with a cult of which self-destruction was the essence. In the face of an error so monstrous, of a worship which outraged the intellect in sanctioning murder and feeing impurity, St. Augustine declared that Christians honoured human nature too much to sup­pose that she herself could have sunk so low, finding it more pious to believe that the Spirit of Evil alone had conceived such horrors, and had dishonoured man that it might enslave him.

But these abominations, calculated as they were to raise every soul against Paganism, helped to subjugate men by depraving them, and thus preserved for more than a century the dominion of which the old religion had been robbed by law. Imperial edicts had pro­scribed the superstitions, dispersed the priests of Cybele and the priestesses of Venus, but all the lustful and bloody features of the old cult survived in the amphitheatre. St. Cyprian had called idolatry the mother of the games, and it was needful for a religion, whose object it was to throw a divine halo over pleasure, to lay prompt hold upon the public amusements. Rome had borrowed from Etruria gladiatorial combats to appease the dead, histrionic dances to cajole the anger of heaven. The Roman people held its festivals for the gods and its ancestors, and laboured to reproduce in symbolic representation the delights of the Immortals. The races of the Circus signified the movement of the stars, the dances of the theatre the voluptuous im­pulses which enslave every living being. In the conflicts of the amphitheatre were depicted in miniature the struggles of humanity. The dedication of the Circus to the sun was marked by an obelisk raised in the midst of the enclosure; on the line dividing it were built three altars in honour of the Cabires; and every column and monument, as well as the post around which the chariots turned, had its tutelary god. Before the opening of the races, a procession of priests bore round the Circus images of the gods reposing on richly embroidered couches, and numbers of sacrificial acts preceded, interrupted, and followed the sports. When the napkin, falling from the hands of the magistrate, gave the signal for the charioteers, the darlings of Rome, to enter the arena, and the intoxi­cated and panting multitude pursued, with cries loud and long, the chariots which they favoured or scorned, divided into furious factions, and ended in coming to blows, then were the gods content, and Romulus recognized his people—his children, indeed—who had lost their worldwide dominion, who were bought and sold for money, but could still forget everything in the Circus, and find therein, according to the expression of a contemporary writer, their temple, their forum, their country, and the theme of all their hopes. The Calendar of 448 still marked fifty-eight days of public games—in that year of terror in which Genseric and Attila were awaiting in full panoply the hour appointed by Heaven.

The theatre was the domain of Venus, for when Pompey restored in marble the wooden benches on which the Romans of old had sat, he dedicated his edifice to the goddess who perturbed all nature by the power of her fascinations. It also was a temple, with a garland-crowned altar in the midst, set apart for a per­formance of the myths in which the gods appeared. as exemplars of the deepest immorality. It was there that the mimes, youths withered from infancy, played in pantomime the loves of Jupiter or the frenzies of Pasiphae. But the prosaic common-sense of the Romans was ill-content with the pleasure of dramatic illusion; they spurned a vainly-excited emotion, so, to soothe their leisure, the ideal had to cede to reality : women were dishonoured on the stage, or, if the drama was tragic, the criminal who played the part of Atys was mutilated, or the personator of Hercules was burnt. Martial boasts of an imperial festival in which Orpheus appeared charming the mountains of Thrace with his lyre, drawing trees and rocks after him enamoured by his melody, and finally torn limb from limb by a bear, while the cries of the actor, who thus threw some life into the languor of the old tragedy, were drowned by songs and dances. Three thousand female dancers served like so many priestesses the theatres of Rome, and were kept in the city when, on the occasion of a famine, all the grammarians were expelled. The sovereign people could not do without its lovely cap­tives; it covered them with applause and with flowers, but caused them to uncover their bodies before the image of Flora. Yet the senators on the front ranks showed no indignation, and the rhetorician Libanius wrote an apology for dancers and mimes, justifying them by the precedent of the pleasures of Olympus, and praising their continuance of the education given to the people formerly by the priest; whilst the pagan party was powerful enough to obtain a prohibition of baptizing actors, except in danger of death, lest as Christians they might escape the public pleasures of which they were the slaves.

Paganism did not afford the gods any sweeter pleasure than that of contemplating the perils of men from the depths of their own repose, so the amphitheatre had more tutelary deities than the Capitol, and Tertullian could say that more demons than men assisted at the spectacle. Diana presided at the chase, and Mars at the combats; and when the magisterial edicts had sanctioned the sports, the men who were the destined prey of the wild beasts appeared in garments sacred to Saturn, whilst the women were crowned with the fillets of Ceres, as victims in a sacrifice. After the earth had been loaded with the corpses of gladiators in one of these popular shows, a gate of the arena opened and disclosed two personages, one bearing the attributes of Mercury struck the bodies with the end of his flame-coloured caduceus, to assure the people that the victims no longer breathed, and the other, armed with Pluto’s hammer, despatched those who still survived. This apparition reminded the spectators that they were assisting at funereal games, and that the blood which was spilt was rejoicing the manes of the old Romans in their infernal dwelling-place. It was the spirit of Paganism which permeated that mighty people, as the magistrates, priests, and vestal virgins bent in applause from the height of the Podium, that they might do high honour to their ancestors, and eighty thousand spectators joined in the action with a shudder of joy. The wise offered no resistance to this brutal­izing of the mass. Even Cicero, though troubled by a momentary scruple, dared not absolutely condemn prac­tices so rife with instruction for a people of warriors ; and the younger Pliny, though a man of benevolence and wisdom, congratulated Trajan on having provided “no enervating spectacle, but manly pleasures, destined to rekindle in the souls of men contempt for death and pride in a well-placed wound.” Yet, as if to humiliate such bloodthirsty wisdom, the military worth of the Romans diminished as the games of cruelty were multiplied. The Republic had never witnessed the suf­ferings of more than fifty pairs of gladiators in a day, but five hundred figured in the games given by the Emperor Gordian; and the Goths were at the very gates of Rome as the prefects were engaged in supplying the arena and finding a sufficient number of prisoners ready to devote themselves for the pleasures of the Eternal City.

Paganism had thus, as if in a forlorn hope, taken its last stand in the public amusements. Thence it defied the eloquence of the Fathers, disputed souls with them, moulded society after its own fashion, and therein it might be known by its fruits. Pagans themselves acknowledged that the passion for the Circus hastened the decline of Rome, and that nothing of mark could be expected from a people which passed days in breathless interest over the issue of a chariot race. And how much more did the fault lie with the theatre, and what eyes could have borne with impunity the ges­tures and scenes in which Rome found her recreation? Christian priests knew the result, and one of them declared that he could point to men whom the incita­tions of those spectacles had torn from the nuptial couch and thrown into the arms of courtesans. Yet fathers of families took their wives and daughters to witness them; nor could they see anything that the temple services had not already made familiar. But the amphitheatre was resistless in its attractions, and the greatest school ever opened for the demoralization of man. Alypius, the friend of St. Augustine, a philoso­pher, a man of learning, and with Christian leanings, was drawn one day, through want of moral courage, to the scenes which his better nature loathed. At first he vowed to see nothing, and closed his eyes, when suddenly, at the sound of a death-shriek, he opened and turned them upon the arena, and did not Withdraw them till the end. He drank in cruelty with the sight of blood, quenched his thirst in the Fury’s cup, and intoxicated his spirit with the reek of the slaughter. No longer the same man, he became like the most ardent of that barbarous crew. He shouted, and felt his veins on fire, and brought away a passion to return, no longer with those who had taken him, but with others dragged thither by himself. To such a depth of irresolution, lust, and savageness had Paganism, ever corrupting itself and man with it, reduced earth’s most civilized people.

Behind the popular creed stood Philosophy, which from having combated now sought to defend it, and succeeded with sufficient art to rally around the old religion the most enlightened members of Roman so­ciety. It had at the outset announced itself to be a revolt of reason against Paganism, and our respect is due to those early sages who remounted to the sources of tradition, to explain the secrets of nature, in spite of the superstitious terrors which barred their approach, and with still greater courage busied themselves in the solitudes of the conscience, still desolate from the lack of Christian enlightenment. They had sought the First Cause to which Socrates, in teaching all the Divine attributes which Creation makes known, had nearly ap­proached. But the mere glimpse of the True God caused the thrones of ,the false deities to totter, and these philosophers, in exposing the foundations of the pagan society, dreaded the collapse of the whole super­structure. Loving truth insufficiently, whilst they de­spised humanity, they devoted their genius to rehabili­tating errors which, as they said, were necessary to the peace of the world. Cicero publicly derided the augurs, but in tracing the plan of an ideal republic in his “ Treatise on Law,” he placed therein augurs, whose decisions were to be obeyed on pain of death. Seneca ridiculed the worship of idols, but did not shrink from drawing the conclusion that even the wise ought to practise it, and thus honour custom and truth. The Stoics justified public worship for reasons of state, and protected the current mythology by an allegorical in­terpretation. Nature they defended as an active prin­ciple, energizing under many forms, and which was open to veneration under many names—to be called Jupiter in the life-giving aspect, Juno in the air, Neptune in water, or Vulcan in fire—explanations which were but as preludes of the prodigious work by which the school of Alexandria was to undertake the reconciliation of the imperial religion with reason.

History has made the school of Alexandria well known, and we can trace its rise in the East, how it passed into the West and established a school at Rome, which concurred in the political restoration of Paganism set on foot by Augustus, was for three ages upheld by the Caesars, and was prolonged to the fifth century through the obstinacy of the patrician order in defend­ing its interests and its deities. Neoplatonism appeared at Rome under Antoninus, in the person of Apuleius, a learned but superstitious and adventurous African, who had visited the schools and sanctuaries of Greece and of Etruria, and returned to travel from town to town, haranguing the people and laying claim to a combination of the wisdom of philosophers, and the piety of the initiated in the Mysteries. The Imperial City admired his eloquence, and the provinces delighted in his opinions, which had such power in Africa that St. Augustine, after the lapse of two centuries, de­voted twenty-five chapters of “The City of God” to their refutation. Meanwhile the declamations of Apuleius had prepared men’s minds for a teaching of greater gravity and deeper scope. Plotinus, the chief of the Alexandrian philosophers, came to Rome in 244, passed twenty-six years there, and reckoned among his auditors senators, magistrates, and matrons of noble birth, to whom this Egyptian of half-frenzied countenance, who expressed himself in semi-barbarous Greek, seemed a messenger of the gods. A praetor was seen to lay down his fasces, dismiss his slaves, and relinquish his property, that he might abandon himself to wisdom. So rapid was the increase of his disciples, that Plotinus was bold enough to demand from the Emperor Gallian a plot of land in Campania on which he might found a city of philosophers, to be governed by the rules of Plato. Although the design failed, and the republic of sages was never constituted, yet he left behind him a host of followers, who carried his doctrines into the senate and the camp, the schools and the social life of Rome. Porphyry was the most faithful and learned of his disciples, and wrote books at Rome, in Sicily, and at Carthage, his three places of residence, which were translated into Latin, finally popularized the Neoplatonic views, and were handed down into the fifth century. Under Valentinian III, Macrobius, in the full blaze of Christianity, wrote a commentary on “Scipio’s Dream,” in which he found occasion to set forth the system of Plotinus as an ancient doctrine, common to the first minds of Greece and Rome, whether poets or metaphysicians, as capable of reconciling every school of thought, and justifying every fable of my­thology. Such being the propagandists of Neoplatonism in the West, it remains to note by what occult influence a philosophy intrinsically abstruse, and charged with Greek subtleties, could seduce the good sense of the Latins.

The contradiction which lay at the root of the old philosophy was the very point of the Alexandrian doctrines. Beginning with a departure from Paganism, they returned to it by long byways, charmed the reason by a promise of sublime dogmas, and satisfied the imagination by conceding all its fables. This was calculated to soothe many a spirit tormented by a double craving after faith and reason, but too weak to embrace the austere belief of the Christians. Plotinus incited a society, trembling at the earliest disasters of the Empire, which seemed to cause all pleasures of earth to slip from their grasp, to take refuge in God. It was necessary, he said, and St. Augustine praised the say­ing, to fly towards the spiritual abodes in which dwelt the Father and every good thing. He spared no effort, however costly, to achieve his lofty aim, and as the giants piled mountain on mountain to reach the sky, so did Plotinus labour to reach a knowledge of God by a fusion of the three great systems of Zeno, of Aris­totle, and of Plato. With Zeno, he gave to the world a soul, which made of it one single existence; with Aristotle, he placed above the world an Intelligence whose sole function was self-contemplation ; and, with Plato, he fixed at the summit of all things an Invisible Principle, which he called the One, or the Good. But though he named it he pronounced it indefinable, and so veiled it from the gaze of mankind. The One, the Intelligence, the World-Soul, were not three Gods, but three Hypostases of a Sole God, who proceeded from his unity to think and to act.

As the three Hypostases produced themselves in eternity, so was the World-Soul engendered in time. It gave forth space first, then the bodies destined to people space, such as the demons and the constellations, lastly men, animals, plants, and the bodies we think inani­mate. But nothing in nature is really inanimate, for everything lives and thinks according to one life and one thought; for the Neoplatonists saw in the infinity of productions an emanation from the Divine Substance communicating itself without impoverishment—the sun pouring forth a wasteless light, the fountain which fed the river reseeking its source, and the whole universe aspiring to return to its primaeval unity.

Nor was the destiny of man’s soul different. Con­tained at first in the Divine Spirit, it had lived a pure life therein, till the sight of the world of matter beneath tempted it to essay an independent existence. Detached from the Divine Parent, it fell to inhabiting bodies formed after its own image, and human life became a Fall, of which the soul could repent, and raise herself so as to pass after death into a higher sphere. But too often she comes to delight in her exile, abandons her­self to the senses, and, on reaching death, is degraded to animating the bodies of brutes or of plants, whose lives of sensuality or of stupidity she had been imi­tating. Thus, in proportion to her wallowing in evil, does the soul sink deeper into matter, till by a supreme effort she tears herself from the mire and begins to aspire ; but, whatever may be the length of probation, its end is certain, for a time must come when good and evil alike shall find themselves confounded in the bosom of the Universal Soul.

This was assuredly a grand and elevating doctrine. When it spoke of a Supreme God, and declared Him to be One, Immaterial, and Impassible, it seemed as if nothing were left but to break the old idols. Some of these, doctrines surprised Christians, who thought them to have been pilfered from the Gospel, as some, nowadays, have accused Christianity of enriching itself from the spoils of Neoplatonism. Yet, without denying that something might have been borrowed from the new religion, published two ages before, all the specu­lations of Alexandria had their issue in Paganism. The Principle placed by Plotinus at the summit of all things had nothing in common with the God of the Christians. They acknowledged in the First Cause perfections which brought Him near to the intellect and to the heart; he robbed his First Principle of every attribute, denied him thought and life, forbade either definition or affirmation concerning him. His god was an abstraction, which could neither be known nor loved, an illogical and immoral being—fit character for the deities of Paganism. A similar abyss separated the trinity of Plotinus from our own, in which the Unity of Nature subsists through the equality of Three Persons, whereas the philosopher destroyed the Divine Oneness in his three unequal Hypostases. In his scheme, the First Principle alone was perfect and in­divisible; the second and third detached themselves from it by a sort of deterioration, and leant towards the imperfect world which they had engendered. Nor was this divided god a free agent, but produced by necessity, by the inevitable outflow of his Substance, a world as eternal as himself. The Pantheism of Plotinus deified matter and justified magic, because, as he said, the philtres and formulas  of the magician tend to reawaken the attractions whereby the Universal Soul governs all things; and it sanctioned idolatry because the sculptor’s chisel, in causing marble to assume a character of expression and beauty, prepares for the Supreme Soul a receptacle in which she reposes with greater satisfaction.

Such was the issue of the boldest flight of metaphysics in the old school, and its accompanying morality proceeded to the same extremities. Since it was the property of the divine nature to produce and animate everything, the human souls which it had generated could not arrest their own descent to matter. In their first fall there was no free will, and, consequently, no moral guilt. If new sins caused them to sink lower, this was but necessary to people the lower regions of the Universe, and fill the ladder of emanations to its last degrees. Evil thus became necessary, or, rather, evil only existed as a lesser good in the succession of existences that were farther and farther removed from the divine perfection which had produced and was to reabsorb them. An ultimate reception into the Unity, in utter unconsciousness of their past, was thus to be the end of both the just and of the unjust. Plotinus therefore returned, through the doctrine of Metempsychosis, to the old fables, and though severe in his personal character, disarmed morality by a suppression of the idea of individual permanence, without which a future life affords in prospect neither hope nor fear; whilst the doctrine of the emanation of the soul from the Divine Substance tended to that worst form of idolatry, the deification of man. The essence of Paganism was breathed forth in the haughty satisfaction with which the dying philosopher answered one of his disciples; “I am labouring,” said he, “to disengage the divine element within me.” In looking closely at the distinctive dogmas of Plotinus, his unrevealed unity, and im­perfect trinity, the emanations which composed the substance of the Universe, the fall and rise of souls, we see traces of the mysteries of an old theosophy long prevalent in the East. The Etruscans had communicated it to the ancient Romans, and their descendants of the Decline might have recognized with surprise, in the writings of the Egyptian philosopher, doctrines which formed the basis of the national religion. They saw them now clothed in eloquence, fortified by the subtleties of logic, brightened by the fires of mysticism; but the Neoplatonists gave them, besides, sufficient justification for the rest of their creed, even to its most extravagant fables. Thus Apuleius had distinguished the incorporeal deities who were incapable of passion from the daemons en­dowed with subtle bodies, but having souls full of human feeling; and mythology had taken refuge in the distinction. It was no longer the gods, but daemons, who loved the odours of sacrifices, whom the poets had brought upon the scene, whom Homer had, without profanation, introduced on the battle­field. Porphyry imagined thousands of explanations for the myths of Egypt and of Greece, and Macrobius made it his one aim to justify the old fables through philosophy; “for,” said he, “the knowledge of things sacred is veiled; nature loves not to be surprised in her nudity. When Numenius betrayed, by a rash interpretation, the mysteries of Eleusis, we are told that the outraged goddesses appeared to him in the guise of courtesans, and accused him of having drawn them from their shrines, and made them public to the passers-by: for the gods have ever loved to reveal themselves to men, and to serve them under the fabulous features in which antiquity has presented them.” The Neoplatonists were equally ingenious in rehabilitating the observances which shocked the reason or outraged nature. Plotinus, being more of a philosopher than a theologian, had only justified the old superstitions incidentally; but his disciples, impatient of the hesitating methods of philosophy, craved for a speedier commerce with heaven by means of theurgy, by sacrifices, spells, and magical arts. Jamblichus wrote a proof of the divinity of the idols, undertook the defence of Venus and Priapus, and approved the veneration of the obscene symbols. The Emperor Julian professed to reform Paganism. He could, with a word, have shorn it of its abominations, but he authorized the mutilation of the priests of Cybele, “for thus does it behove us,” he said, “to honour the Mother of the Gods.” The most learned plunged deepest into superstition, and men  whoseminds had fed on Plato and Aristotle, wasted their vigils in the hope of evoking at their will gods, daemons, and departed souls: or, assembled round a vervein-garlanded tripod, questioned fate as to the end of the emperor and his destined successor. Thus was the prophecy of St. Paul accomplished, and the heirs of that Alexandrian philosophy which professed to have gathered up the scattered lights of antiquity only restored its frenzies of vice.

In this manner was heathenism reinvigorated by the Neoplatonists, precisely as was congruous to a worn-out society, tired of doubt, incapable of faith, but a prey to every superstition which was offered to it. From the pagan aristocracy, whose views they seconded, their welcome was assured, and their school of philo­sophy, which had blossomed into a religious sect, became the bulwark of a political party. In fact, the senatorial families who were attached to the old creed had not followed the court to Constantinople, Milan, or Ravenna, but remained at Rome, to adorn with their patrician majesty the capital which the Caesars had repudiated. In it at least they hoped to guard the sacred hearth of the Empire, and avert the anger of the gods by their fidelity to the ancient rites. They drew to their side and covered with patronage and applause the men who defended by their learning the old interests and the old altars. By the aid of an allegorical interpretation the nobility tasted the sweet­ness of believing otherwise than the common people, and yet preserving the customs of their ancestors; whilst, strong in the teaching of Porphyry and Macro­bius, they looked with pity on the mad crowd who were drawn to Baptism, and cared not to conceal their contempt for the Christian rulers, to whose charge they laid all the disasters of the state. Disquieted within, bearing a threatening attitude to those without, the pagan world looked to them as champions, who, looking again to the future, were ready to support any ruler who would resume Julian’s incompleted task. At court they had followers of mark enough to gain the highest dignities of the state ; from the offices of the priesthood they drew a certain amount of influence and a considerable revenue; their palaces comprised whole towns, and their demesnes were provinces from which they could summon at will an army of slaves and clients; and by the public games which they pro­vided they wielded their last weapon for kindling the passions of the people. At the opening of the fifth century, the best representation of the Roman aristo­cracy, the man best fitted to grace it by his eloquence and learning, was Symmachus, the prefect of Rome. His versatile genius, capable alike in the sphere of politics as in that of learning, was the wonder of his contemporaries; and men of taste, comparing his letters to those of Pliny, desired to see them written on rolls of silk. He had sung of the vine-clad volcanoes of Baiae in graceful verse, and taken a high rank among orators by right of his panegyrics, in which he had exhausted on Christian princes the language of idolatry. So active an intellect could not but live in close rela­tion to the finest wits of the time. In his letters to Ausonius he compared him to Virgil, and the poet’s reply put Symmachus side by side with Cicero. He was the chosen patron of all new lectures and decla­mations. One day he was observed in high spirits at having just been present at the first appearance of the rhetorician Palladius, who had charmed the auditory by his florid eloquence; another time, when the city of Milan had applied to him for a professor of eloquence, he sent for a young African noted for his learning and genius, proposed him a subject, heard with approval, and dispatched him to Milan. The youth was Augustine, and Symmachus little knew the injury he was doing to his gods in sending such a disciple to the Bishop Ambrose. His well-founded authority in literature was enhanced by his brilliant political position. Successively governor of Lucania, proconsul of Africa, prefect of Rome, and lastly consul, as a versatile politician but pure adminis­trator, Symmachus had become the crown of the Roman nobility, and the soul of that senate which he did not hesitate to name the best part of the human race. He beheld in it the last asylum of the doctrines to which he had devoted all his genius and all his fame. Like the patricians of old, whose example he followed, he aspired to reunite all religious and civil honours in his own person, and add the fillets of the priest to the fasces of the consul. To his post in the college of pontiffs he brought a scrupulous ardour which withered the timidity of his colleagues, and groaning over the abandonment of the sacrifices, was as eager to appease the gods by victims as to defend them by the powers of his eloquence.

This zealous pagan, so justly respected for his learn­ing, certainly merited to be the spokesman of the cause of polytheism when it made its last public protest in demanding the restoration of the altar of victory. This altar had stood in the midst of the senate house, had given it the character of a temple, and served to recall the ancient theocratic system of law and the alliance of Rome with the gods. The Christian emperors had removed it as a scandal, and the pagan senators declared that they could no longer deliberate in a place which had been thus profaned, and shorn of the auspices of the divinity who, for twelve hundred years, had preserved the Empire. Symmachus took charge of the complaint, and showed in his protest how much faith the mind of an idolater could preserve. His eloquent plaint began and ended in scepticism, and in face of the religious differences which sundered his contemporaries, his view grew dark and uncertain.

“Every one,” said he, “has his peculiar custom and rite; surely it is just to recognize one and the same divinity beneath these different forms of adoration. We contemplate the same stars, the same heaven is common to both, and we are enfolded by the same earth. What does the manner matter in which each seeks for truth? One sole way cannot suffice for arriving at that great mystery; and yet how healthy are such disputes for the slothful.”

This revealed the hidden sore of paganism, and showed that the efforts of philosophy had only issued in a declaration of the inaccessibility of truth. Yet the spirits which were too worn out for faith had force left still for persecution; and the same Symmachus, who was so uncertain about the gods, to whom the supreme reason of things was veiled by an eternal mist, who deemed religious controversy an unworthy waste of a statesman’s time, hunted down with indefatigable energy a vestal who had fallen. He consulted with the imperial officers, importuned the prefect of the city and the president of the province, and took no repose until he had seen the culprit buried alive, according to the custom of his ancestors; for the bloody instincts of his creed were preserved as fresh beneath the robe of the senator and the polish of the man of culture as beneath the rags of the populace who crowded the amphitheatre. In a.d. 402, Symmachus desired to celebrate his son’s praetorship by games, and before the time fixed had drained the provinces of their rarest products in the way of race­horses, wild beasts, comedians, and gladiators; but amidst these cares an unlooked-for calamity overtook him, which he confided in a letter to Flavian, his friend. All the philosophy of Socrates was not enough, he said, to console him for twenty-nine of the Saxon prisoners whom he had purchased for the arena having impiously strangled themselves rather than serve the pastimes of the sovereign people.

Such was the effect of heathen wisdom on a naturally upright and benevolent soul in the fifth century, that advanced age in the world’s life, bright moreover with all the lights of antiquity. A contemporary historian, himself a pagan, has undertaken a general description of the aristocracy, and represents the last guardians of the traditions of Numa as no longer believing in the gods, but not daring to dine or bathe before the astrologer had assured them of the favour of the planets. The sons of those Romans who had gone forth with the eagle’s flight, as it were, to conquest under the frigid or the torrid zone, thought they had rivalled the doings of Caesar if they coasted the bay of Baiae, cradled in a sumptuous bark, fanned by boys, and declaring life unbearable if a ray of sun stole through the awning spread overhead. They exposed to public gaze all the infamy of their domestic orgies, and appeared abroad surrounded by a legion of slaves, headed by a troop of youths who had been mutilated for their hideous pleasures. What respect could these voluptuaries have for their fellow-creatures? Little did they recognize the sanctity which lies in the blood and tears of men, and whilst they had only a laugh for the clever slave who skilfully killed his fellow, they condemned another to the rods who had made them wait for hot water.

Such men as these loved the creed which left their vices at peace. In despair of truth they only asked for repose in error, and St. Augustine had sounded the depth of their hearts, or rather of their passions, when he put into their mouths this language, that of materialists of every age:—“What matter to us truths which are not to be reached by human reason ? What is of importance is that the State should stand, should be rich, and, above all, tranquil. What touches us supremely is that public prosperity should serve to augment the wealth which keeps the great in splendour, the small in comfort, and, consequently, in submission. Let the laws ordain nothing irksome, forbid nothing that is agreeable; let the ruler secure his people’s obedience by showing himself no gloomy censor of their morals, but the purveyor of their plea­sures ; let the markets teem with beautiful slaves; let the palaces be sumptuous and banquets frequent, at which every one may gorge, drink, and vomit till day­break ; everywhere let the sound of dancing be heard and joyous applause break over the benches of the theatre ; let those gods be held true who have assured us such happiness; give them the worship they prefer, the games they delight in, that they may enjoy themselves with their adorers. We pray them only to make our felicity lasting, that we may have no cause for fear from plague or foe.”

But the foe was at the gate, and the hour approach­ing in which doctrines which had been handed down from school to school, and found their place in the Roman senate, were to undergo their supreme probation before the barbarians, that the world might see what philosophic Paganism could do towards saving the Empire, or, at least, making its fall dignified. In a.d. 408, Alaric presented himself before Rome, and the smoke of the enemy’s camp could be seen from the temple of the Capitolian Jupiter. At this pressing moment the first act of the senate, assembled in delibe­ration, was to put to death Serena, the widow of Stilicho and niece of Theodosius—a victim whom the gods required; for it was said that this sacrilegious Chris­tian had once entered the Temple of Cybele and carried off the necklace from the image. Serena was strangled after the old fashion (more majorum), but that last human sacrifice did not save her country. Alaric demanded all the gold, silver, and precious stones of the city, and only left the Romans their dishonoured lives; whereupon the prefect, Pompeianus, caused the Etruscan priests, who boasted of having saved the little town of Nurcia by their spells, to be summoned, and they undertook to bring down fire from heaven upon the barbarians, but on condition that public sacrifice should be offered at the public expense in presence of the senate, and with all the pomp of past ages. Such an open infringement of the imperial edicts was dreaded by the senate, and as at the same time Alaric modified his conditions, the ransom of Rome was fixed at 6,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 of silver. The patrician families charged themselves with its payment; but as the money in their treasuries did not suffice, it was necessary to seize the gold in the temples; so they robbed the gods they had been defending of their ornaments, and as the weight required was not yet forthcoming, melted down several of their images, and amongst them the statue of Valour (Virtutis). There is something truly pathetic in this catastrophe of a mighty religion; and could one forget all the error which was mingled in its teaching, all the crime which found sanction in its practice, it would be impossible to regard without emotion the believers who clung to it, motionless at the altars of their gods, showing some remnant, if not of the energy, at least of the obstinacy, of the Roman character. We, without justifying their stubbornness, must consider the inevitable perplexity of the mind balanced between two hostile creeds, and especially now that their faith required a struggle. This was in the mind of the Fathers as, acknowledging the painful process by which souls are conquered, they exclaimed, ‘Non nascuntur sed fiunt Christiani!” But we must not, on the other hand, by an unjust parallel, compare the ruin of the fifth century with the confusion of our own time, or place the pagan collapse in the same category with the supposed decline of Christian civilization. History does not halt to point to apparent recurrences of events, knowing that in our softness we always exaggerate the evils of the present time, and find our vanity flattered in surpassing the misfortunes of our ancestors. Civilization, it tells us, cannot perish through passions which it corrects, nor by institutions which it may modify, but by doctrines which an inflexible logic impels to their results. History points to a difference in favour of our age which may reassure the most fearful; for our Christianity does not distinguish, like the heathen philosophy, between the religion of higher minds and that of the people, nor found the peace of the world upon a system of necessary falsehood. It does not, like Plotinus, under the guise of a pantheistic principle, practically deify matter, and issue in governing nations through their interests and their pleasures (panem et circenses), which is pure political materialism. Christianity especially does not profess, with Symmachus, doubt or indifference on the momentous questions of God, the soul, and futurity; but as long as it can give an answer at once supremely authoritative and supremely reasonable to these problems, nothing is really lost, for the truths of eternity do not let fall those societies in time which are of their own moulding, and the invisible is the sustaining influence of that visible civilization in which it reveals itself.

CHAPTER IV.

THE FALL OF PAGANISM, AND WHETHER ITS FALL WAS ENTIRE.