CORRESPONDENCE.
LES SAINTS SUCCESSEURS DES DIEUX.
(To TIM EDITOR ON el. "Sr.cnmou."1
Sra,—Cultus, says Wellhausen, was the residuum of paganism left in the religion of IsraeL To how much of the Old
Testament is this illuminative saying a key 1 The °boom allusions in the historical books, the vehement denunciation i7f the prophets, the traces of primitive practice left even in the revised Codes of the Hexateuch, show its justice. Once it, is recognised, the facts fall into place and present a connected whole. Nor does it hold good only of Israel. In popular belief and observance, as such, the idols of the tribe linger: in no department of life are prejudice and custom so tenacious of existence as here. The religions of to-day are built upon those of yesterday: the earth from which they spring enters into their• substance and moulds their life. If we would knOw what men believe, we must go below their, explicit creeds. These are surface-soil, light and superficial ; the roots of religion lie deeper down. "Lea Saints Successeurs des Dien:: Essais de Mythologie Chrktienne," by M. P. Saintyves (Paris : Emile Nourry, 5 francs), is a study in comparative religion so scholarly and so scientific that, except on points of detail, reply is precluded: the central position is gained. This position is that the callus Of the martyrs and saints in the Christian Church is of pagan origin. To illustrate the thesis M. Saintyves examines the sources of the existing legends, concluding with a chapter on the mythology of proper names, to be followed in. another volume by an inquiry into that of art and ritual, the three forming a link between the religions of the old world and that of the new.
The influence of Greece is as potent in religion as in civilisa- tion in general. Her gods took possession of the templet of Rome and of the churches of Christ. Nor was the process difficult. Free trade in religion was the rule of the ancient world. The substitution was gradual but effective. The Roman deities—magiatrats eurnaturels de la republique—wire uninspiring; the God of Israel, even when humanised, was remote. Nothing is more misleading than the conception of Greek religion derived from Greek philosophy. It would be as reasonable to take Socrates as typical of the theology of his fellow-countrymen as to take Dr. Martineau as representa- tive of English Nonconformity. Miss Harrison in her remarkable "Prolegomena" has described the survival of the old Nature-cults under the worship of the new Olympians ; and a survey of Neo-Platonism, with its kindred theosophies, confirms her picture. The core of darkness cannot be over- looked. Partly of set purpose to attract converts, partly with reluctance as condescending to her environment, partly as declining from her first fervour and welcoming lower standards, the Church' underwent a process of Hellenisatiou, —assimilating, however, rather the lower• than the higher elements of the religion of Greece.
In nothing is this more manifest than in the crowd of minor deities which before long filled the Christian Pantheon. Monotheism is too abstract for average mankind. Inter- mediate beings, angels or demigods, ghosts or demons, were brought in to fill up the interval between heaven and earth. It is not easy to define the attitude of the Church to this secondary religion. She has taken it over into her system, but, as it were, under protest,—common-sense, that advocatus diaboli, has had its say, and, at times, prevailed. The Jewish element in early Christianity frowned upon these develop- ments; but this soon became suspect, and was ejected or merged in the onward movement. A Paul or a John in a basilica of the fourth century would have been as lost as a Jew of the Exile in a Babylonian shrine. A passion for material objects of worship took possession of the Christian world,—a dream, a discovery of bones (not necessarily human), a fancied revelation, and a new martyr, a hero, was called into existence. Nor does this thirst for the marvellous lack modern apologists. Mgr. Gerbet—once, strange to say, a disciple of Lamennais ; later, more consistently, a leading promoter of the Syllabus of 1864—writes with regard to the authenticity of relics: "Un simple pent-etre aurait lui-meme son prix. Dans lea chores de Dieu et du cmur it y a quelquefois des probabilitks adorables." The parallel in Greek paganism was exact ; the cult of the heroes and the popular relic-mongering anticipated Christian usage. And what Rome was to the latter Delphi was to the former. " Delnhes faisait des diens comma Rome fait des saints."
It is difficult to picture to ourselves the mind of the Middle Ages with regard to these matters. In the eleventh century St. Roranald was driven to simulate madness to escape from his monks, who would have murdered him in order to secure his relics, as, to this day, fanatical Arabs will kill a Dervish of peculiar sanctity from the same motive; the bones of the dead being, in their estimation, a more efficacious protection than the presence of the living man. At St. Omer, the visitor was shown the sweat of the Saviour; at Jerusalem, the finger of the Holy Ghost; at Rome, the rod of Moses, and the horns with which, according to the Vulgate reading of Exodus xxxiv. 29, he came down from the mount. Seventeen arms of St. Andrew were exhibited, twelve hands of St. Leger, sixty fingers of St. Jerome. A pious Jesuit of the seventeenth century sees in this multiplication a miracle wrought to increase the devotion of the faithfuL Many of these dupli- cates were, in fact, mere facsimiles of a supposed original, which came in time to be taken as genuine. Some legends arose from the misreading of inscriptions,—a fertile source of blunders; others, like that of the holy house of Loretto, from a play upon words, the family name Angelo being taken to mean angels, as M. Chevalier has shown in his conclusive "Notre Dame de Lorette." The fabulous Cephalophori, or saints carrying their heads in their hands, have their origin in a metaphor used by St. John Clarysostom and taken literally by mediaeval painters: "as soldiers address themselves with con- fidence to their king when they can show the wounds received in his service, so," says this Father, "the martyrs, presenting their severed heads to the king of Heaven, obtain of him their desire." The Madonna della Quercia, or del Olmo, so common in Southern Europe, is a naïf reproduction of the theophany of the Burning Bush. Among the Slays the days of the week appear as saints. We have St. Nediela, or Sunday, and St. Petka, or Friday. The Resurrection—Anastasis—becomes St. Anastasia; the Epiphany, St. Triphaigne ; the calendar, St. Almanack,—as in our own day the Expedition of the French parcel post has developed into St. Expedit. The supply corresponds to the demand.
The cult of the dead was transplanted easily enough from pagan to Christian soil. The Agape, a slight variation of the siticernium of the ancients, served as an inducement to converts unwilling to break with their past. The Third Council of Carthage found it necessary to forbid the adminis- tration of the Eucharist to the dead ; the idea that baptism profited them appears in Apostolic times (1 Corinthians xv. 29). St. Jerome is hard put to it in his controversy with Vigilantius to excuse the excesses which took place in connexion with the vigils and pernoctationes in basilicis martyrum.
The moral of these things is not that this human element in religion should be rooted up—this is impossible—but that it should be pruned, and, above all, that its relativity should be frankly admitted. The religious idea, as it presents itself to us, is necessarily concrete; the divine light never descends unclothed. The eschatology of the Protestant is as fanciful as the hagiology of the Roman Catholic. What M. Saintyves calls la mythologic chretienne cannot be got rid of ; it is inherent in all religion. The mischief begins when what is symbol is identified with what is symbolised. Illusion, it may be, is part of our state, and so beneficent. But this is on the condition that it remains illusion. An illusion which is suspected of being an illusion is no longer an illusion, but a lie. It is the danger of the Churches to forget this. Hence the gulf between their mind, swathed, as it were, in swaddling-clothes, and the free growing mind of mankind. It should be possible to bridge it : it exists rather in us than in things
"The worship of the saints is an essential mass of piety at a certain stage of religious growth. It stands, as does that of the demigods which preceded it, infinitely higher than the older forms of Nature-worship. A recognition of our indebtedness to .past generations, it brings into relief the religiousness of the sense of human solidarity. The dead bulk larger among mankind than the living; to commemorate the lives of great men is neither useless nor absurd. It is the dead who rule and move us ; before every ploughman stands the shade of the inventor of the plough. Shall we smile at the Greeks who raised altars to Plato or to Socrates; at the Christian who venerates St. Francis of Assisi or St. Vincent of Paul? No, with their Master, they set before us personified the fairest lessons of tenderness and compassion that the world has seen. If it is true, as the strong phrase of the Gospel has it, that they were Sons of God, it is true also that they were sons of men. Immortal guides of their fellows, for us they prepared the way, for us they were torn by the thorns that border, and bruised by the rocks that strew, it :—then died, erect and unfaltering to the end. Their giant forms are bathed in the light of the summits ; their shadows loom before us, vaster in the mystery of death. Lost in the distance of the heights, they are yet near us. We feel their presence ; their voices come to us out of the silence of the past, in accents gentle but urgent in their appeal. These divine dead, more living than we, do they not for
ever secure our hope, and call us on to the City of the Heights, the Holy City, the Jerusalem of the Brotherhood of Man ? "
[ We are glad to publish our correspondent's most interest- ing criticism of a very remarkable book. We must not, however, be taken to adopt his point of view. He fails, for example, to note the religious wisdom of the Reformers, and especially of our Puritans, in insisting on the repudiation, not only of every form of superstition, but of things which, though harmless per se, were likely to foster superstition. Superstition is the deadliest of all the foes of true religion, and without constant vigilance the fungus growth of super- stition is always tending to spring up. No doubt the Puritans' "one good custom," had it stood alone, would have corrupted the world, for they were too often blind to the fact that " God fulfils Himself in many ways." Nevertheless, their protest against what Milton called "the trumpery" of one side of the unreformed religion was, when it was made, most needful. —En. Spectator.]
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