The Religious Experience of the Roman People Part 38

[939] So Zosimus, who says they consisted of wheat, barley, and beans.

[940] _R.F._ p. 148 foll.

[941] See the inscription, line 92 foll. Ferrero a.s.sumes that these words were to be taken as representing the families of all wors.h.i.+ppers present, who would repeat the words "mihi domo familiae." But this is arbitrary; the prayer follows the old form as we have it, _e.g._, in Cato, _R.R._ (see above, p. 182), and as Cato or any landowner would represent the rest of the human beings on the estate, so did Augustus represent the whole community.

[942] So J. B. Carter, _Religion of Numa_, p. 160.

[943] The matrons, equal in number to the years of the _saeculum_, first appear on 2nd June in the wors.h.i.+p of Juno.

[944] _Mon. Ancyr._ (Lat.), iv. 21.

[945] Zosimus, _l.c._, says that "hymns" were sung in Greek as well as Latin; but this is not borne out by any other authority.

[946] Line 31 (_et Iovis aurae_), where Jupiter simply stands for the heaven and its influence on the earth; and line 73 (_haec Iovem sentire_, etc.), where he is introduced in the most general way as head of all deities.

[947] Line 147 of the inscription: "Sacrificioque perfecto puer[i X] XVII quibus denuntiatum erat patrimi et matrimi et puellae totidem carmen cecinerunt: _eodemque modo in Capitolio_. Carmen composuit Q.

Horatius Flaccus."

[948] _Eph. epigr._ viii. 256. Wissowa, _Gesamm.

Abhandl._ p. 206, note, who refers to Vahlen and Christ as differing from Mommsen, in papers which I have not seen. Wissowa says that the threefold division of the hymn "springt in die Augen"; but this has never been my experience.

[949] Apart from the awkwardness for singers of the descent from the Palatine and the steep ascent to the Capitol, we may remember that they would have to pa.s.s under the fornix Fabia.n.u.s, which was not much more than nine feet broad (Lanciani, _Ruins and Excavations_, p.

217).

[950] See Hulsen-Jordan, _Topographie_, iii. 72 and note. See also map at the end of the volume, No. 1 of the series. There is, however, some doubt as to whether the site was not on the side of the Palatine looking towards the Tiber over the Circus maximus. See my paper in the _Cla.s.sical Quarterly_, 1910, p. 145 foll. If so, my explanation of the performance of the hymn seems rather to be confirmed than weakened.

[951] Ovid, _Tristia_, iii. 1. 59 foll.

[952] Propertius, iii. 28 (31): "In quo Solis erat supra fastigia currus." No one seems to have noticed the connection between this and Horace's allusion to Sol, which is otherwise not easy to explain.

[953] I will not enter on the insoluble question as to what stanzas or parts of stanzas were sung by the boys and girls respectively. That the hymn was so sung in double chorus is intrinsically probable, and stated in the oracle, lines 20, 21. Some of the schemes which have been propounded are given in Wickham's _Horace_. I imagine that the stanzas may have been sung alternately except in the case of the first two and the last, but the ninth looks as though it might have been divided between the two choirs. Ferrero has a scheme of his own, p. 91 foll.; and if he had taken a little more pains might have worked out the whole problem satisfactorily.

[954] Of these quasi-deities Fides is the oldest, and was a.s.sociated with Jupiter on the Capitol; Wissowa, _R.K._ 103 foll. Thus we may find a _callida iunctura_ between the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth stanzas, for Fides and Pax would fit in well with the _responsa petunt_ of the fourteenth. Whether Pax was recognised as a deity at this time is not quite certain; but a few years later, in 9 B.C., an altar of Pax Augusta was dedicated. The Ara Pacis was begun in 13 B.C. See Axtell, _Deification of Abstract Ideas_ (Chicago, 1907), p. 37, who may also be consulted for the other deities here mentioned. See also above, p.

285. In Tibull. i. 10. 45 foll., Pax seems to be on the verge of deification, but not to have attained it except in the poet's fancy.

[955] The route may be followed in the map of the Via Sacra in Lanciani's _Ruins and Excavations_, and in his chapter ent.i.tled, "A Walk through the Sacra Via," or more shortly in my _Social Life in the Age of Cicero_, p. 18 foll.

_Note._--The whole question of the singing of the _Carmen saeculare_ in its relation to the two princ.i.p.al sites and to the topography of the festival generally, is fully discussed by the author in _Cla.s.sical Review_ for 1910, p. 145 foll.

LECTURE XX

CONCLUSION

"A time of spiritual awakening, of a calling to higher destinies, came upon the world, the civilised world which lay around the Mediterranean Sea, at the beginning of our era. The calling was concentrated in the life and death of the Founder of Christianity."[956] The writer of these words goes on to point out that the beginning of our era was "a time of general stirring in all the higher fields of human activity," and that all such stirring, all that brings higher ideals before the minds of men of action, of imagination, or of reflection, if not itself religion, is in some sense religious, and in that age must be taken into account as having some bearing on the origin of Christianity, the greatest of all religious movements. And inasmuch as the new spirit of the age seems to have put new life into the old religious systems, with the help of philosophy and poetry, as well as of a purer and more effective conception of Man's relation to the Power manifesting itself in the universe, he finds it useful and legitimate to show how the ideas and characteristics of the leading types of religion in the civilised world of which he speaks were absorbed or "baptized" into the spirit of Christianity. In other words, we may ask what was the contribution of each of these religious types to the formation of the Christian type of religion; for however new was the inspiration which was the essential living germ of our religion, yet that germ was of necessity planted in soil full of other religious ingredients, which found their way into the sap of the plant as it grew towards maturity.

I have all along wished to bring our subject, the religious experience of the Roman people, into touch with Christianity, whether by marking points of contact, or of contrast, or both. In the last few lectures I have laid stress on certain points likely to be useful to us in this last stage of our studies, and these will, I hope, furnish us with some amount of material. But I confess that I have approached this subject with great hesitation. What I shall have to say will be tentative and suggestive only; but I hope that the account that I have given in these lectures of Roman religious experience may be of use in helping a better qualified student to carry on the work more adequately.

Let us glance back for a moment at the results of the last four lectures, in which I have been dealing with Roman religious experience after the paralysis or hypnotism of the old religion of the State. We saw, in the first place, that the educated part of Roman society had been brought to the very threshold of a new and more elevating type of religion, by Greek philosophy transplanted to Roman soil, and chiefly by Stoicism. True, one great Epicurean genius had had his share in this process, by denouncing the weakness and wickedness of the Roman society, and the futility of all the religious forms and fancies with which they still dallied; but Lucretius had nothing to offer in the place of these forms and fancies--nothing, that is, which could grip the conscience and act as a real force upon conduct. The Roman was in a religious sense dest.i.tute, both of a real sense of duty to his fellow-men of all grades, and in regard to G.o.d; and for this dest.i.tution Lucretius' remedy, the accurate knowledge of a philosophical theory of the universe, was wholly inadequate. The first real appeal to the conscience of the Roman came from Stoicism, the reasonable and less austere type of Stoicism which Panaetius preached to the Scipionic circle. From this the Roman learnt that as a part of the divine universe Man himself is divine: that as endowed with a portion of that Reason which itself is G.o.d, he has a sacred duty to perform in using it. Thus, as the Universal was revealed, so the Individual was enn.o.bled; and the only thing wanting to make of this a real religion was a bond that might unite the two more effectually in conduct as well as in thought. Though a later development of Stoicism did indeed all but achieve this union, that of the later Republic failed to do so, because it inherited the old Stoic neglect of the emotional side of man's nature, and could take little advantage from a strong current of mystical feeling that was running side by side with it. The Stoic ingredient in the soil which was being prepared for Christianity was rich and valuable, but in this one respect it was poor.

It was intellectually beautiful, but it stirred as yet no "enthusiasm of humanity."[957]

Another ingredient in the soil was that imaginative transcendentalism which we discussed under the name of Mysticism, in which the soul becomes of greater interest than the body, and a strange yearning possesses the mind to speculate on the nature of the soul, its existence before this life, and its lot in another world. These imaginative yearnings were not native to the Roman, who had never had any very definite idea of a future life, nor had ever troubled himself about a previous one; they filtered through the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy into that type of later Stoicism which attracted him. They were hardly treated in Roman society with real religious earnestness, except perhaps in some few moments of sorrow and emotion such as I dwelt on in the experience of Cicero. But the mere fact that they were in the air at Rome is of importance for us. They _stimulated the imaginative faculty in religious thought_; they kept alive in the minds at least of some men the questions why we are here, what we are, and what becomes of us after death. They prepared the Roman mind for Christian eschatology; and this, though never so important in the Latin Church as in the Greek, was yet an important part of the teaching of the early Church.

St. Paul exactly expresses the yearning thus dimly foreshadowed in the mystical movement of which I am speaking: "We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life" (2 Cor. v. 4). It was essential that the Roman should be able to understand words like these, and to a.s.sociate them with a religion which, though in its most vital points one mainly affecting this life, was also, like those of Isis and Mithras, strongly tinged with mysticism. "All religions of that time," it has lately been said, "were religions of hope. Stress was laid on the future: the present time was but for preparation. So in the mysterious cults of h.e.l.lenism, whose highest aim is to offer guarantees for other worldly happiness; so too in Judaism, whose legacy has but the aim of furnis.h.i.+ng the happy life in the kingdom of the future. But Christianity is a religion of faith, the gospel not only giving guarantees for the future life, but bringing confidence, peace, joy, salvation, forgiveness, righteousness--whatever man's heart yearns after."[958]

Yet another ingredient was that kindly, charitable, sympathetic outlook on the world which we found in the poems of Virgil, and which is a.s.sociated throughout them with the idea of duty and honourable service.

The husbandman toiling cheerfully and doing his simple acts of wors.h.i.+p, among the patient animals that he loves, and the scenes of natural beauty that inspire him with pure and tender thoughts; and then again in the _Aeneid_ the warrior kept true to his goal by a sense of duty stimulated by supernatural influence: both these sides of the Virgilian spirit show well how the soil is being prepared for another and a richer crop. Love and Duty are the essentials of Christian ethics; they are both to be found in this poet, and through him made their way into the ideas of the better Romans of the next generation, and so into the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. "To minds touched with the same sense of life's problems which pervades the poetry of Virgil, the ideas that came from Galilee brought the rest and peace which they could not find elsewhere."[959] The early Christian writers loved the "vates Gentilium," and St. Augustine in particular is for ever quoting him; but I should be going beyond the limits of my subject if I were to follow his gentle influence farther down the stream of time.

In my last lecture we discussed the revival of the old religious forms by Augustus, and the consummation of this work of his in the splendid ritual of the _Ludi saeculares_. Can it be said that such an astute and worldly policy as this had any value in the way of preparation for Christianity? Only, I think, in one way; it renewed the idea of the connection between religion and the State, and of the religious duties of the individual citizen towards the State. It preserved the outward features of the old State religion, such as the calendar, the ritual, and the terminology or vocabulary, and handed these down to a time when they could be of service to a Latin Christian church.[960] Had the old forms been allowed to go utterly to rack and ruin, as they had been already doing for the last two centuries, the Roman State would have been as such without religion, or the wors.h.i.+p of the Caesars would have become disastrously powerful and prominent, or maybe the State would have adopted the religion of Isis or Mithras or some other Oriental cult and belief, before Christianity could lay a firm grasp on it. I think it might be shown that the continuity of the old religion in its connection with the State was really of value in keeping these growths from occupying too much ground: of value in checking too rapid a growth of individualism:[961] of value too in cheris.h.i.+ng certain really precious religious characteristics, orderliness and decency in ritual, for example, which, as we have seen, were very early developed in the Roman religious system, and which owed their continued vitality to the overwhelming influence of the Roman State over all her citizens and their ideas. Thus when at last, after a period of anxious conflict between rival religions, the State proclaimed itself Christian, and henceforward for good or ill extended its protection to the Church, its religious tradition was still one of decency and order, still free from almost all that the old Roman State knew and dreaded as _superst.i.tio_.

There was, in fact, a legacy, not indeed a spiritual one, but yet one of some small value, left by the old Roman religion to the Latin Church: and this I will turn for a few minutes to examine.

As an example of the orderly, sane, and decent character which the Church inherited from the Roman religion, I might recall what I said in Lecture IX. about _l.u.s.tratio_, that slow and orderly processional movement in which the old Romans delighted, and which is familiar still to all travellers in Italy.[962] Another is the tender and reverential care for the resting-places of departed relatives. I am not sure that Prof. Gardner is right in a.s.serting that the prayers for the dead of the Catholic Church took the place of the wors.h.i.+p of the dead in the Roman family;[963] for it is not easy to say how far it is true that the dead were ever really wors.h.i.+pped at Rome, and the idea of prayer for the dead, if it can be traced to Roman sources at all, may be rather due to those tendencies which we discussed under Mysticism, than to anything inherent in the old Roman att.i.tude to the departed. None the less there is in the _sacra privata_ of the Parentalia, and especially of the Caristia which concluded it--a kind of love-feast of all members of the family, where all quarrels and differences were to be laid aside,[964]--something that suggests the Christian att.i.tude towards the dead, and in some dim way too the doctrine of the Communion of Saints.

And we may also notice how closely in regard to externals the great events of family life,--those critical moments when the aid of the _numina_ was most needed--the first days of infancy, the eras of p.u.b.erty and of marriage, pa.s.sed on in their sober and orderly ritual into the baptism, confirmation, and sacramental wedding of the Christian Church.

In such ways the private religion of the Roman family had doubtless a real continuity in the new era, though the line of connection is difficult to trace. This, and many other examples of survival, the wors.h.i.+p of local saints which took the place of that of local deities, the use of holy water and of incense as symbolic elements in wors.h.i.+p, and the general resemblance of the arrangement of festivals in the Calendars, Roman and Christian, might be interesting matter for a complete course of lectures, but must be omitted here.

Another point of interest, which might also be widely expanded, is the influence of the Roman religious _spirit_, as distinct from the outward form, on Christian thought and literature in the Western half of the Empire. The subtle transcendentalism of the Greek fathers was foreign to Latin Christianity; the characteristics of Roman life as reflected in Roman wors.h.i.+p are plainly visible in the Latin fathers. From Minucius Felix onwards, the Christians who wrote in Latin, so far from being imaginative and dreamy, are one and all matter-of-fact; historical, abounding in ill.u.s.tration of life and conduct; ethical rather than speculative; legal in their cast of thought rather than philosophical; rhetorical in their manner of expression rather than fervent or poetical. They were well versed in the great literature of Rome, but most of them, and especially the African school (which carried Roman tendencies to an extreme), knew comparatively little of Greek. St.

Augustine, for example, could not bring himself to work at Greek with ardour, nor could he explain why this was so.[965] Of Augustine, as the type of the literature of Latin Christianity, Bishop Westcott wrote with something of an exaggerated criticism, lamenting that he had not the Greek which had so large a place in the Bishop's own training. "He looked" (more particularly in the _de Civitate Dei_) "at everything from the side of law and not of freedom: from the side of G.o.d, as an irresponsible sovereign, and not of man, as a loving servant. In spite of his admiration for Plato, he was driven by a pa.s.sion for system" (how this reminds us of the old Roman religious lawyers!) "to fix, to externalise, to freeze every idea into a rigid shape. In spite of his genius he could not shake off the influence of a legal and rhetorical training, which controversy called into active exercise."[966] The lecture from which I am quoting is an interesting one, on the work and character of Origen, the great Alexandrian of the third century A.D., with whom Augustine is contrasted, as in an earlier age we might contrast Seneca with Philo; the Latin writers rhetorical, practical, realistic; the Greek authors idealistic and fervent, apt to see deep moral significance in all human life. And this is really the manner and mental att.i.tude of all the famous Latin fathers: of Lactantius, the clear, precise Ciceronian, whose every page shows the perennial value of the Latin tongue; of Tertullian, the subtle and acute rhetorician, more gifted with imagination than his fellows; of Arn.o.bius, another Roman African, the reputed teacher of Lactantius.

One of the characteristics of these Latin fathers is their fondness for using the famous words of the old Roman religion, but in new senses.

They inherit that Roman love for a strong technical word of pregnant meaning which has left us so many imperishable legacies in terminology.

_Municipium_, _colonia_, _imperium_, _collegium_, rise in one's mind the moment the subject is mentioned; and a few minutes' thought will reveal another score of words which in various forms pervade all our modern European terminology. So, too, with the language of religion. These Latin advocates of Christian doctrine took the old words which we have so often dwelt on in the course of these lectures, and gave them new but almost equally clear and pregnant meanings. Let us glance at three or four of these; for such a legacy as this is no mean property of the Christian religion of the West.

Let us take, to begin with, the greatest of all these words--_religio_.

I have maintained throughout these lectures that the original sense of this word was the natural feeling of man in the presence of the supernatural; and though this has actually been questioned since I began them,[967] I see no good reason to alter my conviction. But in the age of Cicero and Lucretius the word begins to take on a different meaning, of great importance for the future. Though Cicero as a young man had defined _religio_ as "the feeling of the presence of a higher or divine nature, which prompts man to wors.h.i.+p,--to _cura et caerimonia_,"[968]

yet later on in life he uses it with much freedom of that _cura et caerimonia_ apart from the feeling. To take a single example among many: in a pa.s.sage in his _de Legibus_ he says that to wors.h.i.+p private or strange or foreign G.o.ds, "confusionem habet religionum";[969] and again he calls his own imaginary _ius divinum_ in that treatise a _const.i.tutio religionum_, a system of religious duties.[970] In many other pa.s.sages, on the other hand, we find both the feeling which prompts and the cult-acts which follow on it equally connoted by the word; for example, the phrase _religio sepulcrorum_ suggests quite as much the feeling as the ritual. So it would seem that _religio_ is already beginning to pa.s.s into the sense in which we still use it--_i.e._, _the feeling which suggests wors.h.i.+p, and the forms under which we perform that wors.h.i.+p_. In this broad sense it is also used by Lucretius, who included under it all that was for him the world's evil and folly, both the feeling of awe which he believed to be degrading, and the organised wors.h.i.+p of the family and the State, which he no less firmly believed to be futile.

"Tantum _religio_ potuit suadere malorum."[971] The fact is that in that age, when the old local character of the cults was disappearing, and when men like Posidonius, Varro, and Cicero were thinking and writing about the nature of the G.o.ds and kindred subjects, a word was wanted to gather up and express all this religious side of human life and experience: it must be a word without a definite technical meaning, and such a word was _religio_.

Thus while _religio_ continues to express the feeling only or the cult only, if called on to do so, it gains in the age of Cicero a more comprehensive connotation, as the result of the contemplation of religion by philosophy as a thing apart from itself; and this enabled the early Christian writers, who knew their Cicero well, to give it a meaning in which it is still in use among all European nations.

But there was yet to be a real change in the meaning of the word, one that was inevitable, as the contrast between Christianity and other religions called for emphasis. The second century A.D. was that in which the compet.i.tion was keenest between various religious creeds and forms, each with its own vitality, and each clearly marked off from the others.

It is no longer a question of religion as a whole, contemplated by a critical or a sympathetic philosophy; the question is, which creed or form is to be the true and the victorious religion. Our wonderful word again adapts itself to the situation. Each separate religious system can now be called a _religio_. The old polytheistic system can now be called _religio Deorum_ by the Christian, while his own creed is _religio Dei_.

In the _Octavius_ of Minucius Felix, written about the end of the second century, the word is already used in this sense. _Nostra religio, vera religio_,[972] is for him the whole Christian faith and practice as it stood then--the depth of feeling and the acts which gave it outward form. The one true religion can thus be now expressed by the word. In Lactantius, Arn.o.bius, Tertullian, in the third century A.D., this new sense is to be found on almost every page, but a single n.o.ble pa.s.sage of Lactantius must suffice to ill.u.s.trate it. "The heathen sacrifice," he says, "and leave all their religion in the temple; thus it is that such _religiones_ cannot make men good or firm in their faith. But 'nostra _religio_ eo firma est et solida et immutabilis, quia mentem ipsam pro sacrificio habet, quia tota in animo colentis est.'"[973]

Here at last we come upon a force of meaning which the word had never before attained. _Religio_ here is not awe only or cult only, but _a mental devotion capable of building up character_. "The kingdom of G.o.d is within you." Surely this is a valuable legacy to the Christian faith from our hard, dry, old Roman religion.

Another legacy in words is that of _pius_. Our English word "pious" has suffered some damage from the sanctimoniousness of a certain type of Puritanism; but _piety_ still remains sweet and wholesome, and, like its Latin original in the middle ages it seems to express one beautiful aspect of the Christian life better than any other word. In the old Roman religion _pius_ meant the man who strictly conforms his life to the _ius divinum_; this we know from the very definite ancient explanations of its contrary, _impius_. The _impius_ is the man who _wilfully_ breaks the _ius divinum_ and the _pax deorum_; for him no _piaculum_ was of avail.[974] Such a crime is the nearest approach in Roman antiquity to our idea of sin. _Pius_ is therefore, as we saw in discussing Aeneas, the man who knows the will of the G.o.ds, and so far as in him lies adjusts his conduct thereto, whether in the life of the family or as a citizen of the State. As applied to things, to a war for example, the word _pium_ is almost equivalent to _iustum_ or _purum_, _i.e._, _pium bellum_ is a war declared and conducted in accordance with the principles of the _ius divinum_.[975] _Pietas_ is therefore a virtue, that of obedience to the will of G.o.d as shown in private and public life, and it herein differs from _religio_, which is not a virtue, but a feeling. But we need not be surprised to find that in Lactantius _pietas_ can be used to explain _religio_; for _religio_ is no longer a feeling only or a cult only, but, as we saw just now, a mental devotion capable of building up character. In one pa.s.sage he says that it is no true philosophy which "veram religionem, id est summam pietatem, non habet."[976] In another interesting chapter he shows plainly enough that he uses _pietas_ just as he uses _religio_, to express the whole Christian mental furniture.[977] He begins by scornfully pointing to Aeneas as the typical _pius_, and asking what we are to think of the _pietas_ of a man who could bind the hands of prisoners in order to slaughter them as a sacrifice to the shade of Pallas[978] (little dreaming, indeed, that Christian piety should ever be guilty of such slaughter in the cause of the faith); and ends by asking, "What, then, is _pietas_? Surely it is with those who know not war; who keep at peace with all men; who love their enemies and count all men their brethren; who can control their anger and curb all mental wilfulness." And once again, _pietas_ is the main ingredient in _iust.i.tia_, that is, in Christian righteousness, for "pietas nihil aliud est quam Dei notio." Even here it is not so far removed from its old meaning; but in a Christian writer it can mean conformity to the will of G.o.d, based on a real knowledge of Him, in a sense which shows us by a sudden illuminating flash the deep gulf set between the old religion and the new.

Another word, bequeathed in this case rather by the Latin language than the Roman religion, in which it held no strictly technical meaning, is _sanctus_, which has played so large a part in the terminology of the Catholic Church, and pa.s.sed thence into the language of Puritanism for the living Christian, as in Baxter's famous book, _The Saints' Rest_.

The exact meaning of _sanctus_ is extremely difficult to fix, and this may be why it was found to be a convenient word for a type of character negative rather than positive. The lawyers defined it as meaning what is _sancitum_ by the State,[979] without tracing it back to a time when the State was a religious as well as a civil ent.i.ty. But there was beyond doubt a religious flavour in it from the beginning, as in other old Italian words connected with it; and thus it seems to be able to express a certain conjunction of religious and moral purity which finally brought it into the hands of the Christian writers. A single verse of Virgil will serve to explain what I mean. Turnus, before he rushes forth to meet his death at Aeneas' hand, and knowing that he is to meet it, asks the Manes to be good to him, "quoniam superis aversa voluntas,"

for--

_sancta_ ad vos _anima_ atque istius nescia culpae descendam magnorum haud unquam indignus avorum.[980]

He goes to the shades with a conscience clear of guilt or of _impietas_; as the ancient scholiast interprets the word, it is equivalent to _incorrupta_.[981] In this sense it became one of the favourite superlatives to describe in sepulchral inscriptions, pagan or Christian, the purity of departed women and children.[982]

Lastly, we have the great word _sacer_, with its compounds _sacrificium_ and _sacramentum_. The adjective itself has no new or special significance, I think, in the language of the early Christians, and in our Teutonic languages the Roman sense of it, "that which is made over to G.o.d," is expressed by the word _holy_, _sacred_ being retained in a general sense for that which is not "common." But _sacrificium_, the act of making a thing, animate or inanimate, or yourself, as in _devotio_, over to the G.o.ds, is indeed a great legacy on which I do not need to dwell. _Sacramentum_, on the other hand, needs a word of explanation.