PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY.*
THE want of a dispassionate review of the character of the pre- Christian religion of Rome, in its relations both to the Roman populations and to primitive Christianity, has long been felt and deplored, alike by intelligent believers and by honest inquirers. We do not say that the work of M. Boissier has completely satisfied the desire to have the interesting and profoundly important period between the reformation of Paganism by Augustus and the appearance of a definite Christianity under the Antonines, considered and described with a scrupulous re- gard for facts and a scrupulous disregard for prepossessions. Some leading writers on the Christian side—M. Kraft, for instance, in the erudite Revue des Questions Historiques—would wish that M. Boissier had not allowed himself to examine the Roman paganism without some distinct recognition of a standard of comparison and adjudication, that standard being, of course, the Christian one. The argument of M. Kraft would be that over-impartiality towards one side runs into partiality towards the other, and that even hypothetical depreciation of the merits of the Christian revelation practically tells in favour of its pagan predecessor. We cannot but think, however, that a writer who is generously, perhaps excessively, disposed to recognise the good that underlay the old polytheism and the progress that ger- minated in the old philosophy, and who yet comes to the con- clusion that both the Pagan faith and the Pagan wisdom were utterly inadequate to the task of revivifying and reconstituting society,—such a writer, we repeat, must produce a more solid and lasting impression on inquiring minds than the professed and somewhat passionate advocates of the Christian religion. There are, of course, certain drawbacks in the eyes of the convinced Christian to such a balanced and unsympathising system of pro- cedure. We have books enough—comparatively speaking, at least—for convinced Christians, and we are glad to welcome the appearance of a work which, taking little for granted, is all the more likely to extend the area of intelligent conviction.
The authorities which M. Boissier uses to control, and often to supply data to, his own conclusions are in themselves speaking testimonies to the extent of his studies and the sobriety of his research. The celebrated third volume of M. de Champagny's Ce"sars, containing the moral and religious portraiture of the Roman world at the end of the first century ; M. IIavet's- bril- liant anti-Christian work, Le Christianisme et ses Origines ; Preller's Romizche Mythologie ; Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen ; Fried- * La Religion Romaine c Auguste ass katOltiltd. Par Gaston Boissler. Pails: Hachette et Cie. 1874. lander's comprehensive Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Rams, together with the great collections of Latin inscriptions of Orelli, Henzen, Mommsen, Hubner, Zangemeister, and Renier,—these and numerous minor sources of information have been carefully consulted, and are often cited through the two volumes of La Religion Romaine & Auguste aux Antonins. The limitation of M. Boissier's field of observation, which excludes the whole considerable period of official Paganism subsequent to the Antonine era, may at first sight seem somewhat arbitrary and motiveless. It is, on the contrary, inspired by solid reasons most strictly germane to the investigation into the nature of the Roman polytheism, if not exactly as it was in itself, at least as it was previous to the introduction or, as some theorise, the evolution of Christianity. "The history of Rdman paganism from Augustus -to its last moments," says M. Boissier, "appears to me to divide itself into two distinct periods,—that in which it developes itself according to its principle and nature, and that in which it essays to reform itself on the model of the religion which menaces it .and which it opposes. Of these two periods, I study here the first alone. I stop at Marcus Aurelius,--that is to say, at the anoment when the apologists make Christianity known to the world." M. Boissier does not, indeed, affirm that before this epoch no communications had taken place by secret and sur- reptitious avenues between the one religion and the other, or that Christian doctrines may not have already exercised a certain influence upon paganism ; but while granting the legitimacy of such surmises, he goes so far as to deny the possibility of estab- lishing their accuracy. The Fathers of the Church express themselves in no precise manner on the point, and at best the influence of Christianity in the pre-Antonine era must have been unable to impress any direct or distinct direction on the course which paganism was following of itself, and on which it bad embarked since Augustus,—that is to say, since a date anterior to the advent of the Christian Revelation. On the other band, .from Commodus, and especially from Septimus Severus, the two religions had come into such manifest and manifold contact that the most virtuous of Pagan developments must be liable to be contested as conscious or unconscious plagiarism of a Christian original. In justice, then, to that paganism which he seeks to appraise at its real estimate, the author of La Religion Romaine confines his investigations to the period in which both the vices and the merits of the pagan system were confessedly its own, and it is throughout in the same delicate and sober spirit of inquiry that he asks and seeks to resolve the two fundamental questions,— Was the regeneration of mankind within the scope of Paganism ? Was Paganism in any effective sense a factor of the Christian :religion?
M. Boissier's two volumes are subdivided into three books, -together with an introduction and a conclusion. In a series of -exhaustive chapters, compact of erudition, and judiciously devoid of the garish and meretricious glare so common to modern French writers in the domain of Christographic studies, we are presented -with careful examinations and judgments upon the religious and moral reforms of Augustus, the imperial deification, the Augustan era, Virgil and the philosophic and theosophic Sixth Book of the lEneid, what became of the Augustan reforms, the foreign reli- gions at Rome, the Roman philosophy after Augustus, the .doctrines of Seneca, the supposed relations between Seneca and Saint Paul, the Roman theology, the higher classes under the Antonines, the ladies and women at Rome, the lower classes and the popular associations, the slaves. Through all these various scenes and departments of his subject, the author exhibits the perpetual, the increasing, the feverish influence of superstition, religion, or religiosity in every class of the Roman world. The gods were everywhere, in the brothels as on the Capitol, and all the gods of all the nations had become substan- tially the same in the second century of the Empire, with the 'exception of the supreme and omnipotent Jehovah of Jews who waited for, and Christians who had found, the Divine Messiah.
After studying, investigating, viewing in this light and in that, the great religious movement in the Pagan world, in which the Fathers of the Church saw at once an awakening of conscience and intelligence from materialism, and an artifice of the Evil One to misdirect the devotional aspirations of mankind, M. Boissier demands,—Is it possible to recognise in the sensual domination of a multiform idolatry, or in the evanescent influence and callous virtue of some scattered Stoic groups, any approach or resem- blance to the Christian reform of worship and society ? By his plan of following the philosophico-religious movement down to the end of the Antonine era, he is fully enabled to demonstrate that by that time the philosophers had exhausted them-
selves ; the speculations of Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, which had always passed' far above the heads of the crowd, were de- finitely struck with decrepitude. The world, the best thinkers of it, had sought refuge for a space from the gross and worn- out fables of polytheism in the domain of intellectual theoris- ings ; but theorisings without data could never produce what the world thirsted for—Truth—and by the end of the Ant onine period the theorisers were obsolete. A few disciples might hug the old half-thoughts and half-guesses, but guessing had ceased to be either an encouraging or an interesting occupation. It was in a society in which the highest efforts of Paganism had only proved the existence of a vast want, that Christianity came with divine truths and human sympathies for the special purpose of supplying that want. In a word, the capital distinction between Paganism and Christianity was that while Paganism was something fluid, undecided, shifting, asserting nothing for positive, because it knew nothing for positive ; disturbing men's minds till they were prone to superstition, but not instructing men's minds to be ripe for faith ; ignorant of truth, and consequently tolerant of every species of local gods and national idolatries, but equally intolerant of the one God and His universal faith,—in a word, while Paganism was a mere creedless bundle of doubts and nega- tions, and consequently a licentious aggregate of inclinations and vices, Christianity neither doubted nor permitted disobedience, Christianity was at once a creed and a code, and taught with the mien and the authority of Divine Truth the inseparable religion and morality of the Gospel. The step which the Roman world took from Paganism to Christianity was a step out of uncertainty into certainty, out of doubt and error into truth and faith, out of fog and cloud and nebulosity into open day, out of a quicksand on to firm land. The Primitive Church, indeed, did not present at the awakening intellects and consciences of humanity the in- terminable deductions of succeeding ages of dogmatic offence and defence. It taught man, however, enough of what man yearned to know and love. Who was God, what were man's duties, what his rights, his origin, and his destined end ; what meant the coming, the life, and the suffering of Christ ; how man should know and shun-falsehood and know and cherish truth,—in a word, the simple and constituent elements of a revelation which was from God, and was to outlast time and lead to eternity. It was no contest of fog and fog which lit up the light of Christianity. No, the Light was sent into this world, and slowly and obstinately the thick darkness became dissipated before it. Paganism had definitely become at once scepticism and sterility, says M. Boissier, and therefore it produced neither the Christian faith nor the Christian civilisation..
Previous page
