J. M. Robertson

“ The things on the other side of the shield—the religious wars, the consecration of error, the strangling of truth, the persecutions, the propagandist massacres, the countless cruelties wrought in the name and on the sanction of the faith—are from this point of view external to its history: things to be set down to the perversity of men. All the good that has happened is to be credited to Christianity; all the bad to human nature. ”

“ The repeated discussions over the removal of the statue of Victory were on the senatorial side a tissue of artificial rhetoric, on the Christian a mixture of frank bigotry and bad sophistry. Religious fanaticism, the last and lowest form of moral energy, abounded only with the mob; and the formless pagan crowd, never in touch with priests or senators, and never conscious of a common centre, was useless for political purposes when at length the upper class had need of it; while the much smaller Christian mob, drilled and incited to a common fervour, was a force formidable even to the autocrat. ”

“ Boethius, the last of the ancient philosophers, was a Christian only in name, expounding its orthodox dogma as a lawyer might expound law: when he came to write his consolations in prison he went back to the ancient and universal ethic, putting aside his creed as he might a mask. The vogue of his book in the Dark Ages is the expression of thinking men’s satisfaction in a late Latin treatise which brooded gravely on life and death in terms of human feeling and wisdom, with no hint of the formulas of the priest. ”

“ Alone among the nations Greece contributes nothing to the world’s renovation. Italy, despite the papacy, has a swarm of eager and questioning thinkers, working at the human sciences; Spain stirs under all the leaden folds of clericalism; but Greece, where the faith has never undergone eclipse since Justinian’s day, remains intellectually almost Byzantine, vainly divided between Christian dogma and an external classic tradition, neither ancient nor modern. ”

“ If we talk of moral success, it must still be said that Christianity never gave any section of the Roman Empire a ruler worthy to stand by Marcus and Julian; and that on all the thrones of the world to-day there is no man who can be put above them for moral nobility. If, again, we keep our eyes on the age of Constantine, we cannot but be struck by the fact that Constantius “the pale,” the father of Constantine, a monotheist but not a Christian, and Julian, who turned away from Christianity to polytheism, are by far the best men in the series of rulers of that house. ”

“ And though the person of the emperor was seldom quite safe from assassination by his soldiery, the imperial cult played its part from the first in establishing the fatal ideal of empire. No sequence of vileness or incompetence in the emperors, no impatience of the insecurity set up by the power of the army to make and unmake the autocrat, no experience of the danger of a war of claimants, ever seems to have made Romans dream of a saner and nobler system. ”

“ Classic paganism knew no such infamy. All the horrors which Christians are wont to cite as typically heathen, the legends of Juggernaut and the pictures of Dahomey, dwindle in moral bulk beside the dreadful sum of evil set forth in the past of their own faith. For the Protestant lands burned at least as many hapless women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft as the Inquisition burned men for heresy. Most of the victims were women whose sole offence had been to have few friends. ”

“ Before there can be all-round minds there must be all-round men; and the empire had made an end of the species. Intellectual originality had long disappeared from a world in which the topmost distinction stood for mere brute force, cultured men grovelling before it like scourged animals. The brooding intensity of Lucretius and the large sanity of Cæsar were become as impossible to men of the Roman name as the life of the forum of Coriolanus’ [128] day, or the Greek literature of the age of Aristophanes. ”

“ Every science in turn, from the days of Galileo, has had to fight for its life against the sanctified ignorance of all the churches; and while the physical sciences, which can be taught without open reference to traditional error, have carried their point and received endowment in turn, happily without being tied down to any documents, the moral sciences are either kept in tutelage to theology in the universities of many countries, our own included, or forced to leave out of their scope the phenomena of religion itself, and in particular the sociological problem of Christian history. ”

“ Pagan Greece lives for ever in men’s thought as a dream of grace and beauty and enchanted speech; and though behind the shining vision of art and song there lingers immovably a sombre memory of strife and servitude, the art and the song are a deathless gift to mankind. At every summit of its attainment our civilization looks back to them with an unquenchable envy, an impotent desire, as of a race disinherited. ”

“ Their science and philosophy began in Asia Minor, on the soil of the half-scientific, half-religious lore of the overthrown Assyrian and Babylonian cultures of the past, in a leisurely and half-oriental atmosphere; and after the first free evolution of its germs in the manifold life of their countless competitive City States, the most notable growth of their philosophy was in the period when their political failure began to declare itself, and the shadow of despotism was falling on men sobered and chagrined by the spectacle of ceaseless intestine strife. ”

“ The formula of the Trinity was no more truly monotheistic for the new faith than it had been for ancient Egypt; and the mere belief in an Evil Power was a negation of monotheism. But when saints came to be prayed-to at separate shrines, and every trade had its saint-patron, the Christian system was both theoretically and practically as polytheistic as that of classic Greece, where Zeus was at least as truly the Supreme God as was the Father for Christians. And in the elevation of Mary to Goddesshood even the formal semblance of monotheism was lost, for her worship was in the main absolute. ”

“ From the very first, in short, the temper of Protestant propaganda, met as it was by brutal resistance, had been one of brutal animosity. There is indeed no more grotesque spectacle in human history than the association of the phrase “a religion of love” with the masses of furious controversy which constitute the bulk of Christian theological literature in all ages of faith. Amenity has been much rarer in religious strife than in actual warfare, where animal good humour could at times mitigate or overlay animal hate. Fighters could meet and banquet after a fight: theologians could not. ”

“ During those ages in which the Christian Church was so spreading as to become at length the fit cultus of the decaying State, its history is almost wholly one of internal and external strifes, conflicts between the Church and its pagan persecutors, between its literary champions and pagan criticism, between the champions of orthodoxy and the innovating heretics, between the partisans of dogmas whose life-and-death struggle was to determine what orthodoxy was to be. ”

“ The crowning irony of the evolution lay in the entrance of unbelief into the Christian world through the very contact with the “infidel” who was to have been crushed. This perhaps was the discovery that disillusioned the papacy. And but for the spirit of faith and hate—the true correlatives in Christian history—every gain from the Crusades might have been made ten times over in commerce. To make such gains at the price of nine million lives and unutterable evil is the contribution of the Crusades to civilization. ”

“ When finally we seek to realize the aspect of the Hellenistic world in the time of Mohammed, in contrast with that of the age of Pericles; or the Rome of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in contrast with that of Hadrian, we are conscious of an immense loss of human faculty for beauty and joy, no less than for action. It is not too much to say that the Christian ideal of sanctity meant not only self-mortification and sadness but squalor in the individual life. Physical uncleanliness became a Christian virtue; and the mark of a city built in the Christian period came to be the absence of baths. ”

“ Of the moral and intellectual unprogressiveness of Byzantium we may say, finally, that the Christian State, like those of the Saracens and the Turks, was in large measure kept stationary precisely by the relation of constant strife set up by the existence of the enemy. Each was the curse of its antagonist. And Christianity did no more to raise men above that deadlock of enmity than did Islam; nay, the further factor of Byzantine isolation represented by the rupture between the Greek and Latin Churches was a special product of the Christian system. ”

“ To say nothing of the perpetual scandal about concubinage—an artificial form of sin, in itself no more decisive against a priest’s character than celibacy in its favour—there is in the canons of the councils a most significant repetition of vetoes on various lines of conduct which stand for a lack of single-mindedness, and of serious interest in moral tasks. Century after century, the bishops are found forbidding the clergy to tell fortunes, to practise magic, to get drunk, to commit perjury, to take usury, to swear, and to haunt taverns, as well as to keep concubines. ”

“ On the intellectual side, ancient Christianity is on the whole at its strongest in the West, just before the fall of the western empire, as if the last mental energies of the Roman [154] world had there found a channel. Augustine passed on to the middle ages a body of polemic theology sufficiently vivacious to constitute a Christian classic; and in him at last the Latin church had produced a personality comparable to Origen. Jerome, on the other hand, could compare with Origen as a scholar, and like him he laid bases for the scholarship of a later and reviving age. ”

“ Had a succession of Roman emperors set themselves to create a priestly organization of pagan cults, with as good an economic basis as that of Brahmanism, or as that of Judaism was even after the fall of the Temple, they could have created a force which might triumph over the new cult in its own sphere even as Brahmanism and Judaism did. And if at the same time they had left the Church severely alone, allowing its perpetual strifes to do their own work, it would inevitably have dissolved itself by sheer fission into a hundred mutually menacing factions, an easy foe for a coherent paganism. ”

“ No such level was ever reached in the Christian empire, from Constantine onwards. Julian himself schemed more solid reforms of administration in his one year of rule than any of his Christian successors ever accomplished, with the exceptions of Marcian and Anastasius; and could he have foreseen how the empire was to go in Christian hands he would certainly have had no reason to alter his course. To take the mere actual continuance of Christianity as a proof of its containing more truth or virtue than the whole of paganism is to confuse biological survival with moral merit. ”

“ Thus on every side and at every point in the history of the ages of faith the ostensibly best religious influences are found failing to heal society, failing to check the forces of oppression and dissolution and strife. If we would trace the forces which really affected social structure and raised masses of men some way in the scale of manhood, we must turn to the clash of interests and classes, the play of secular knowledge, the undertakings of laymen on normal lines of aspiration and on secular views of right. ”

“ Paganism as a public system disappeared because it was deprived of all its revenues; Christianity as a system finally flourished because the church was legally empowered to receive donations and legacies without limit, and debarred from parting with any of its property. Any corporation whatever, any creed whatever, would have flourished on such a basis; while only a priesthood capable of building up a voluntary revenue as the Christian church had originally done could survive on pagan lines after the Christian creed had been established. ”

“ The history of Christian Byzantium, from the rise of Islam to the fall of Constantinople, is the typical instance of mental stagnation. During a period of eight hundred years, even friendly research professes to discover in Byzantine annals only one writer’s name per century which posterity can be expected to keep in memory. Such a history is the complete confutation of the common theory that Christianity is in itself a force of progress; but once more we must take note that Christianity was not the determining cause of the arrest. Civilization progresses by the contact of cultures ”

“ It was in fact a clear source of political weakness, though not so deadly a one as the autocracy itself. To seek to suppress it, accordingly, was almost a natural outcome of Diocletian’s ideal of government. He had sought to give a new air of sanctity to the worship of the emperor by calling himself Jovius and his colleague Maximian Herculius; and to make the effort succeed it might well seem necessary to crush the one cult that directly stood in the way, alike as a creed and as an organization. ”

“ Rhetoric, the bane of the decadent pagan literature, infects equally all the Christian writers, giving to the most vehement the ring of inflation and false passion. Literature of artistic or intellectual value was almost at an end. Such Christian poets as Prudentius and Paulinus have indeed merit in their kind; but they could not begin a literary renascence under the conditions set up either by fanatical Christianity or by the worldly spirit which divided with fanaticism the control of the Christian Church and State in the West as in the East. ”

“ In a special degree the Osirian and Dionysian and Mithraic cults seem to have insisted on the doctrine of immortality correlatively with the doctrine of eternal punishment; and insofar as Mithraism is to be known from the present form of the Zendavesta, which is but a revised portion of the older Mazdean literature, it appealed to the imagination on this side at least as winningly as did the Jesuist literature in respect, for instance, of the Apocalypse. Mithra was the God of the upper and the nether world, the keeper of the keys of heaven and hell, of life and death ”

“ While the literary movement of English Deism in the eighteenth century was not ostensibly grounded on physical philosophy, being rather critical and logical, it always kept the new science in view; and the movement in France, as set up by the young Voltaire, connected itself from the first with the Newtonian philosophy, which there had to drive out the Cartesian, now become orthodox. In the hands of La Mettrie biological science pointed to even deeper heresy; and for such propagandists as Diderot and D’Holbach all science was an inspiration to a general rejection of religion. ”

“ In the processes by which Protestantism lost ground, as in those by which Catholicism counteracted its own successes, there was a considerable play of intellectual forces, which we shall consider apart. But though the economic, the political, and the intellectual forces always interact, the two former have had a potency which has thus far been little acknowledged. It is essential to realize that they have affected the movement of thought more than they have been affected by it; and above all that they, and not the imaginary bias of race, have determined the total fortunes of the Reformation. ”