Greco-Roman mystery religion

“ How could a religion, so poverty-stricken of thought, with its troops of phantom gods, beingless shadows and deified abstractions, remain unscathed and unaltered when it came in contact with the profusion of the Greek religion, with its circle of gods, so full of life, so thoroughly anthropomorphised, so deeply interwoven into everything human?" [135]
Not only from Greece but from every conquered country, strange gods were brought into Italy and placed in the Roman pantheon. ”

“ It is impossible, then, that this beautiful idolatry, against which the philosophers might occasionally protest,103.3 could have weakened the popular faith in the native deities. Introduced suddenly into Rome it helped to destroy the old Roman animistic religion. But the religious instinct and history of Greece was wholly different from that of Rome. Greek polytheism would probably have perished or been transformed by alien systems of cult far sooner than it was, if Greek art had not fortified and ennobled it, rooting it deeply in the æsthetic-religious emotions and perceptions of the people. ”

“ Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries. ”

“ We forget only too readily how much Christianity, in its victory over Greek philosophy, owes to this very philosophy. Christianity could no doubt have achieved the moral and social regeneration of the people without these weapons of the Greek mind; but a religion, especially in the age of the downfall of Greek and Roman philosophy, must have been armed for battle with the best, the most cultured, and the most learned classes of society, and such a battle demanded a knowledge of the weapons which had been forged in the schools of Greek philosophy. ”

“ By the beginning of the second century it was evident that in its conflict with pagan polytheism and philosophy Christianity could hope to win the victory only by taking into itself the fundamental elements of that intellectual life and civilization which the Greco-Roman world had been establishing through centuries. Its claim that the gospel was universal, that it solved the deepest mysteries and satisfied the highest human aspirations, inevitably brought it into the arena of contemporaneous life. ”

“ Its best elements took refuge in the church, and became converted, or at least took Christian names. Now the gods were dethroned, oracles and prodigies ceased, sibylline books were burned, temples were destroyed, or transformed into churches, or still stand as memorials of the victory of Christianity.
But although ancient Greece and Rome have fallen forever, the spirit of Græco-Roman paganism is not extinct. It still lives in the natural heart of man, which at this day as much as ever needs regeneration by the spirit of God. ”

“ New gods could easily be identified with the old, or else be received along with them without a conflict. The religion of the Greco-Roman world is therefore different from that of ancient Greece. It is a curious mixture of the most diverse beliefs. Nevertheless, the whole deserves to be called Hellenistic, because even the most strikingly non-Grecian elements were usually subjected more or less to the subtle molding of the Greek spirit. ”

“ Human nature, in whatever creed, bows in involuntary homage to the woman who has left her home, and father and mother, brother, sister, and friends, to follow Jesus Christ and him crucified. This instinct is as old as man. The pagan Greek, the brutal Roman, punished with almost incredible severity offences against their oracles and vestals. History furnishes no instance of a nation possessing a religion however ridiculous, a worship however coarse and senseless, which did not award exceptional deference to the virgins consecrated to the service of its gods. ”

“ These prove beyond question that the later Greek drama, when adapted for Roman audiences, must have had a considerable influence upon Roman religion and Roman society. The gods are intentionally held up to ridicule; they are represented as being more immoral and baser than common men ”

“ Christianity offered almost no field for the exercise of Greek anthropomorphism. The latter was closely bound up with polytheism and hero-worship. The Christian Apostles and Saints, who took the place of the pagan Deities, were men who had lived on the earth and whose deeds belonged not to mythology but to history, although at the time the line between history and mythology was not clearly drawn, and history was largely diluted with myth. A few impersonations of nature, such as river-gods, lingered on in the paintings of the Roman catacombs. ”

“ But these legends must not be compared to those of Greece, in which the religious sentiment gave a supernatural glory to the effusions of the bard, painted men as heroes and heroes as deities, and, while it was the natural growth of the Greek intellect, twined itself around the affections of the people. The Roman religion was a ceremonial for the priests, and not for the people, and in Roman tradition there are no traces of elevated genius or poetical inspiration. ”

“ All Greece became involved in these new methods of attaining salvation, these emotional and fiery ceremonials. No nation ever attained such heights of artistic philosophy in so short a time; none ever created such an advanced system of ethics practically without Deity and entirely devoid of the promise of human salvation; no nation ever plunged so quickly, deeply, and violently into such depths of intellectual stagnation, moral depravity, and spiritual poverty as these same Greek peoples when they flung themselves into the mad whirl of the mystery cults. ”

“ Any worshipper can suspend the scientific part of his mind while worshipping. But a religious belief that is morally contemptible is in serious danger, because when the religious emotions surge up the moral emotions are not far away. And the clash cannot be hidden.
This collapse of the traditional religion of Greece might not have mattered so much if the form of Greek social life had remained. If a good Greek had his Polis, he had an adequate substitute in most respects for any mythological gods. ”

“ Little by little, as the natural charm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out of barbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it was lost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purely artistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time to time minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. ”

“ The latter-day philosophies of Greece had dealt a severe blow at Roman religion by convincing the intellectual classes in the community that in the nature of things there could be no such knowledge as that upon which religion was based, and hence that religion was an idle thing unworthy of a true man's interest. Yet all the philosophy in the world could not take away from a Roman his sense of duty to the state. ”

“ This absence of a priestly caste had considerable effect upon the flexile and familiar nature of the Grecian creed, because there were none professionally interested in guarding the purity of the religion, in preserving to what it had borrowed, symbolical allusions, and in forbidding the admixture of new gods and heterogeneous creeds. The more popular a religion, the more it seeks corporeal representations, and avoids the dim and frigid shadows of a metaphysical belief. ”

“ We know that they erected statues to their martyrs, of which we have a specimen in that of St. Hippolytus in the Vatican library. The numerous works, lastly, which have been found in the Christian catacombs at Rome, might alone be a sufficient proof that the early Christians were not hostile towards the representation of the heroes of their religion in works of art. In fact, Christianity during the middle ages became as much the mother of the arts of modern times, as the religion of Greece was the mother of ancient art. ”

“ With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the time. ”

“ No spectacle can be presented to the thoughtful mind more solemn, more mournful, than that of the dying of an ancient religion, which in its day has given consolation to many generations of men.
Four centuries before the birth of Christ, Greece was fast outgrowing her ancient faith. Her philosophers, in their studies of the world, had been profoundly impressed with the contrast between the majesty of the operations of Nature and the worthlessness of the divinities of Olympus. ”

“ And if we trust merely to the reflections of the Greek spirit in modern literature and art, we shall be acting as the Roman Church in its darker ages has acted, in shutting away from the people recourse to the primary documents of religion, and obliging them to be content with such interpretations of those documents as the ruling hierarchy judged to be useful. ”

“ Even the making of images to the gods became more of a work in art than a matter of worship.
The Olympian gods illustrate man's typical anthropomorphism. But the Greek mythology was more aesthetic than ethic. The Greek religion was helpful in that it portrayed a universe governed by a deity group. But Greek morals, ethics, and philosophy presently advanced far beyond the god concept, and this imbalance between intellectual and spiritual growth was as hazardous to Greece as it had proved to be in India. ”

“ It was more religious because of the unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. ”

“ Greek gods and Greek ideas had displaced Roman gods and Roman ideas, and the official representatives of religion, the state priests, were carrying the whole burden of worship on their own shoulders, because popular interest had been in the main deflected and was working along other lines. These lines of rival interest were superstition and scepticism, phenomena which at first sight appear as distinct opposites, but which are on the contrary very closely akin, so that [Pg 117] they usually occur together not only in the same age, but frequently even in the same individual. ”

“ Yet such a view is only a partial one; in it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture but loses sight of the sombre world across which it strikes. Greek religion, where we can observe it most distinctly, is at once a magnificent ritualistic system, and a cycle of poetical conceptions. Religions, as they grow by natural laws out of man's life, are modified by whatever modifies his life. ”

“ In examining Greek myths, then, it must be remembered that, like all myths, they have far less concern with religion in its true guise—with the yearning after the divine which "is not far from any one of us," after the God "in whom we live, and move, and have our being"—than with the religio, which is a tissue of old barbarous fears, misgivings, misapprehensions. ”

“ It was one of the various roads which instructed men took to escape from the literal admission of the ancient mythes, and to arrive at some new form of belief, more consonant with their ideas of what the attributes and character of the gods ought to be. It was one of the ways of constituting, by help of the mysteries, a philosophical religion apart from the general public, and of connecting that distinction with the earliest periods of Grecian society. Such a distinction was both avowed and justified among the superior men of the later pagan world. ”

“ If art alone could ensure the perpetuity of a religion, the religion of Greece would still remain. Neither the eloquence of St. Paul nor the sublime maxims of the Gospel which he preached would have been able to supplant it. But God has implanted in the mind of man the desire for the true as well as for the beautiful; and the possession of truth alone can satisfy the soul.
The Athenians were always in great unrest on religious matters; they were ever inquiring, ever disputing, ever seeking out new gods and new forms of worship, and of course were never satisfied. ”