THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRANZ CUMONTS WORK

Franz Cumont, born January 3, 1868, and educated at Ghent, Bonn, Berlin, and Paris, resides in Brussels, and has been Professor in the University of Ghent since 1892.His monumental work, Textes et monuments figures relatifs aux mysteres de Mithra, published in 1896 and 1899 in two volumes, was followed in 1902 by the separate publication, under the title Les Mysteres de Mithra, of the second half of Vol.I, the Conclusions in which he interpreted the great mass of evidence contained in the remainder of the work.The year following, this book appeared in the translation of Thomas J. McCormack as The Mysteries of Mithra, published by the Open Court Publishing Company.M. Cumont’s other work of prime interest to students of the ancient faiths, Les religions orientales dans lepaganisme romain, appeared in 1906, was revised and issued in a second edition in 1909, and is now presented in English in the following pages.

M. Cumont is an ideal contributor to knowledge in his chosen field.As an investigator, he combines in one person Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic intuition.As a writer, his virtues are no less pronounced.Recognition of his mastery of an enormous array of detailed learning followed immediately on the publication of Textes et monuments, and the present series of essays, besides a numerous series of articles and monographs, makes manifest the same painstaking and thorough scholarship; but he is something more than the mere savant who has at command a vast and difficult body of knowledge.He is also the literary architect who builds up his material into well-ordered and graceful structure.

Above all, M. Cumont is an interpreter.In The Mysteries of Mithra he put into circulation, so to speak, the coin of the ideas he had minted in the patient and careful study of Textes et Monuments; and in the studies of The Oriental Religions he is giving to the wider public the interpretation of the larger and more comprehensive body of knowledge of which his acquaintance with the religion of Mithra is only a part, and against which as a background it stands.What his book The Mysteries of Mithra is to his special knowledge of Mithraism, The Oriental Religions is to his knowledge of the whole field. He is thus an example of the highest type of scholar the exhaustive searcher after evidence, and the sympathetic interpreter who mediates between his subject and the lay intellectual life of his time.

And yet, admirable as is M. Cumont’s presentation in The Mysteries of Mithra and The Oriental Religions, nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose that his popularizations are facile reading.The few specialists in ancient religions may indeed sail smoothly in the current of his thought; but the very nature of a subject which ramifies so extensively and so intricately into the whole of ancient life, concerning itself with practically all the manifestations of ancient civilization philosophy, religion, astrology, magic, mythology, literature, art, war, commerce, government will of necessity afford some obstacle to readers unfamiliar with the study of religion.

It is in the hope of lessening somewhat this natural difficulty of assimilating M. Cumont’s contribution to knowledge, and above all, to life, that these brief words of introduction are undertaken.The presentation in outline of the main lines of thought which underlie his conception of the importance of the Oriental religions in universal history may afford the uninitiated reader a background against which the author’s depiction of the various cults of the Oriental group will be more easily and clearly seen.

M. Cumont’s work, then, transports us in imagination to a time when Christianity was still at least in the eyes of Roman pagans only one of a numerous array of foreign Eastern religions struggling for recognition in the Roman world, and especially in the city of Rome.To understand the conditions under which the new faith finally triumphed, we should first realize the number of these religions, and the apparently chaotic condition of paganism when viewed as a system.

“Let us suppose,” says M. Cumont, “that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits should all be preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation a confusion in which all those priests should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein.Such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine.”

But it is no less necessary to realize, in the second place, that, had there not been an essential solidarity of all these different faiths, the triumph of Christianity would have been achieved with much less difficulty and in much less time.We are not to suppose that religions are long-lived and tenacious unless they possess something vital which enables them to resist.In his chapter on “The Transformation of Roman Paganism,” M. Cumont thus accounts for the vitality of the old faiths:“The mass of religions at Rome finally became so impregnated by neo-Platonism and Orientalism that paganism may be called a single religion with a fairly distinct theology, whose doctrines were somewhat as follows:adoration of the elements, especially the cosmic bodies; the reign of one God, eternal and omnipotent, with messenger attendants; spiritual interpretation of the gross rites yet surviving from primitive times; assurance of eternal felicity to the faithful; belief that the soul was on earth to be proved before its final return to the universal spirit, of which it was a spark; the existence of an abysmal abode for the evil, against whom the faithful must keep up an unceasing struggle; the destruction of the universe, the death of the wicked, and the eternal happiness of the good in a reconstructed world."

If this formulation of pagan doctrine surprises those who have been told that paganism was “a fashion rather than a faith,” and are accustomed to think of it in terms of Jupiter and Juno, Venus and Mars, and the other empty, cold, and formalized deities that have so long filled literature and art, it will be because they have failed to take into account that between Augustus and Constantine three hundred years elapsed, and are unfamiliar with the very natural fact that during all that long period the character of paganism was gradually undergoing change and growth.“The faith of the friends of Symmachus,” M. Cumont tells us, “was much farther removed from the religious ideal of Augustus, although they would never have admitted it, than that of their opponents in the senate.”

To what was due this change in the content of the pagan ideal, so great that the phraseology in which the ideal is described puts us in mind of Christian doctrine itself?First, answers M. Cumont, to neo-Platonism, which attempted the reconciliation of the antiquated religions with the advanced moral and intellectual ideas of its own time by spiritual interpretation of outgrown cult stories and cult practices.A second and more vital cause, however, wrought to bring about the same result.This was the invasion of the Oriental religions, and the slow working, from the advent of the Great Mother of the Gods in B. C. 204 to the downfall of paganism at the end of the fourth century of the Christian era, of the leaven of Oriental sentiment.The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution.The Great Mother and Attis, with self-consecration, enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of the sun, with the Persian dualism of good and evil, and with after-death rewards and punishments all these, and more, flowed successively into the channel of Roman life and mingled their waters to form the late Roman paganism which proved so pertinacious a foe to the Christian religion.The influence that underlay their pretensions was so real that there is some warrant for the view of Renan that at one time it was doubtful whether the current as it flowed away into the Dark Ages should be Mithraic or Christian.

The vitalization of the evidence regarding these cults is M. Cumont’s great contribution.His perseverance in the accurate collection of material is equalled only by his power to see the real nature and effect of the religions of which he writes.Assuming that no religion can succeed merely because of externals, but must stand on some foundation of moral excellence, he shows how the pagan faiths were able to hold their own, and even to contest the ground with Christianity.These religions, he asserts, gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience.“The spread of the Oriental religions” again I quote a summary from Classical Philology “was due to merit.In contrast to the cold and formal religions of Rome, the Oriental faiths, with their hoary traditions and basis of science and culture, their fine ceremonial, the excitement attendant on their mysteries, their deities with hearts of compassion, their cultivation of the social bond, their appeal to conscience and their promises of purification and reward in a future life, were personal rather than civic, and satisfied the individual soul....With such a conception of latter-day paganism, we may more easily understand its strength and the bitter rivalry between it and the new faith, as well as the facility with which pagan society, once its cause was proved hopeless, turned to Christianity.”The Oriental religions had made straight the way.Christianity triumphed after long conflict because its antagonists also were not without weapons from the armory of God.Both parties to the struggle had their loins girt about with truth, and both wielded the sword of the spirit; but the steel of the Christian was the more piercing, the breastplate of his righteousness was the stronger, and his feet were better shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

Nor did Christianity stop there.It took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to the new religion.“As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely,” writes M. Cumont, “the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs.We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.”

M. Cumont is therefore a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity of history.Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, but a composite of slow and laborious growth.Its four centuries of struggle were not a struggle against an entirely unworthy religion, else would our faith in its divine warrant be diminished; it is to its own great credit, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that it finally overwhelmed them.To quote Emil Aust:“Christianity did not wake into being the religious sense, but it afforded that sense the fullest opportunity of being satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect must give place to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and vice.It had out of its own strength laid out the ways by which it advanced to lose itself in the arms of Christianity, and to recognize this does not mean to minimize the significance of Christianity.We are under no necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the Evangel streams into it brightly enough without this."

Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger intellectual movement.Their effort is only one manifestation of the interest of recent years in the study of universal religion; other manifestations of the same interest are to be seen in the histories of the Greek and Roman religions by Gruppe, Farnell, and Wissowa, in the anthropological labors of Tylor, Lang, and Frazer, in the publication of Reinach’s Orpheus, in the study of comparative religion, and in such a phenomenon as a World’s Parliament of Religions.

In a word, M. Cumont and his companion ancient Orientalists are but one brigade engaged in the modern campaign for the liberation of religious thought.His studies are therefore not concerned alone with paganism, nor alone with the religions of the ancient past; in common with the labors of students of modern religion, they touch our own faith and our own times, and are in vital relation with our philosophy of living, and consequently with our highest welfare.“To us moderns,” says Professor Frazer in the preface to his Golden Bough, “a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilization....But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned.Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress....”

It is possible that all this might disquiet the minds of those who have been wont to assume perfection in the primitive Christian church, and who assume also that present-day Christianity is the ultimate form of the Christian religion.Such persons if there are {xiv} such should rather take heart from the whole-souled devotion to truth everywhere to be seen in the works of scholars in ancient religion, and from their equally evident sympathy with all manifestations of human effort to establish the divine relation; but most of all from their universal testimony that for all time and in all places and under all conditions the human heart has felt powerfully the need of the divine relation.From the knowledge that the desire to get right with God the common and essential element in all religions has been the most universal and the most potent and persistent factor in past history, it is not far to the conviction that it will always continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of religion pure and undefiled will never perish from the earth.

GRANT SHOWERMAN.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.