IV.Royce and the Problem of Christianity
Our American philosopher, Josiah Royce, has always been occupied with the religious aspects of philosophy, but has of late shown a special interest in the philosophical interpretation of the doctrines of the Christian Faith. His mature views are expressed in his essay on "What is Vital in Christianity?" in his volume, "William James and Other Essays" (1911), and in his Lowell lectures, "The Problem of Christianity" (1913).
Royce believes that if there is to be a philosophy of religion at all, such a philosophy must include in its task "the office of a positive and of a deeply sympathetic interpretation of the spirit of Christianity, and must be just to the fact that the Christian religion is, thus far at least, man's most impressive vision of salvation, and his principal glimpse of the homeland of the spirit."[196]
In Christianity Royce finds a religion of loyalty, defined as "the practically devoted love of an individual for a community." Christianity is in its essence "the most typical, and so far in human history, the most highly developed religion of loyalty;"[197]and it was in Pauline Christianity that the Christian ideas of the community,the lost state of the individual and of atonement or grace first received their full statement, though not their complete formulation. Paul's addition to the doctrine of love, thought by himself to be inspired by the Spirit of the Ascended Lord, consisted in his placing love to the church side by side with love to God and to one's neighbour. "Christian love, as Paul conceived it, takes on the form of Loyalty. This is Paul's simple but vast transformation of Christian love."[198]
The reduction of what is vital in Christianity to the so-called pure gospel of Christ, as recorded in the body of the presumably authentic sayings and parables, is to Royce profoundly unsatisfactory. "If He had so viewed the matter, the Messianic tragedy in which His life-work culminated would have been needless and unintelligible."[199]What is most vital in Christianity "is contained in whatever is essential and permanent about the doctrines of the incarnation and atonement."[200]
In these respects Royce shows his sympathy with traditional Christianity as over against the standpoint of modern liberalism. He protests in effect, in the first place, against a "reduced" Christianity based upon the Synoptic teachingof Jesus alone, and upon this teaching only after alleged Johannine and Pauline elements have been cut out. Secondly, he finds that Christianity includes doctrine as well as ethics. And, third, he finds in Paul's teaching not a perversion of the gospel, but a developed statement of the central ideas of Christianity.
Unlike many philosophers, Royce takes an austere view of the misery and tragedy of sin, as "grave with the gravity of life, and stern only as the call of life, to any awakened mind, ought to be stern."[201]The sinner cannot save himself. By his own deed he has banished himself to the hell of the irrevocable. If there is to be atonement which shall reconcile the traitor to his own deed and the community to the act of treachery against it, an atonement stated in purely human terms, it must be an "objective" atonement, not merely one of moral influence upon the traitor. It must be by some creative deed of loving ingenuity by which the world is made better than it would have been had the treason never been done. Thus the family of Jacob was reunited in peculiarly tender ties after the reconciliation. "Through Joseph's work all is made better than it would have been had there been no treason at all."[202]
In his purely human and untheological treatment of sin and grace, Royce's thought hasprofessedly moved within the limits of social relationships. Sin is an act of broken faith or disloyalty to the community. The sinner is restored from his estate of misery by the saving grace of the community.[203]"'Atonement' and 'Divine Grace' may be considered as if they were expressions of the purely human process whereby the community seeks and saves, through its suffering servants and its Spirit, that which is lost."[204]
While Royce's exposition of sin and grace is full of suggestion and insight, it is more philosophical than Biblical. Thus at important points the contrast between Paul and Royce's interpretation of Paul is very striking. Royce hints at the divinity of the community, while Paul asserts the divinity of Christ. Royce says, Be loyal to the community, while Paul would say primarily, Believe in Christ and be loyal to Him. "Loyalty to the personal Christ," says a reviewer of Royce's work, "has been (and surely is) even a more vital element in Christianity than loyalty to the community."[205]Royce would say that by the grace of the community we are saved; while with Paul the Saviour is personal and it was the vision of Christ, not of the community, that transformed his life.
Again it is not easy to read the doctrine of the beloved community and of the community as the source of grace into the words or the spirit of the teaching of Jesus. The attempt, however, is made. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the voice of the father, who is "for the moment simply the incarnation of the spirit of this community,"[206]is said to be the voice of the family, welcoming the wanderer; and the joy of the father is the joy of the family in his return. If this be so the father should have said, "The family fellowship is restored," instead of saying, "This my son was dead and is alive again."
Even Royce's Old Testament illustration from the story of Joseph, where we find a grievous betrayal and then a deed which leaves the community, in this case the family, richer in love and more united in heart than if the deed of betrayal had not been done, does not support Royce's principle that the ideal community is the saviour and the source of atoning grace. The story to be illustrative should have been reversed; Joseph should have been the betrayer and destroyer of the family life, and then the brethren unitedly by their love and ingenuity should have won him back.
How then does the loyal community which is to be the source of grace originate? Royce admits that it can only be by "some miracle ofgrace,"[207]and the problem becomes acute when we consider the origin of the historical community of the Christian Church. The usual view is that here a miracle of grace has happened in the person of Jesus, the author and finisher of loyalty, but in that case there could be no such "simplification of the problems of Christology,"[208]as Royce desires. Who, then, was the founder of the Christian Community? It was not Paul, for he found a community already in existence. It was not the human Jesus, though He gave the signal, for we cannot say that, speaking of Jesus as an individual man, we know that He explicitly intended to found the Christian Church.[209]It was not the divine Christ, for "the human source of all later Christologies must be found in the early Christian community itself."[210]We must in fact renounce our quest for the origin of the Christian Church, for its foundation depended "upon motives which we cannot fathom by means of any soundings that our historical materials or our knowledge of social psychology permit us to make."[211]Such recourse to a convenient agnosticism, however rhetorically it may be expressed, does not bring us out of the circle, that the church founded itself, and in that case, as a source of grace, saves itself. The modern man,under Royce's guidance, is relieved from the problems of Christology only to find that those of ecclesiology are equally pressing.
The conception of the community is obviously fruitful alike in its ethical and its theological implications, and Royce's discussion of it, so elevated in its tone, will doubtless be for the "strengthening of hearts" as he desires. But inferences foreign to Christian thought are drawn when it is suggested that "Man the community may prove to be God,"[212]and that in "this essentially social universe" the community is "the Absolute."[213]This is the voice of Hegel rather than that of Paul.
In an essay on Browning's theism Royce has remarked: "To say God is Love is, then, the same as to say that God is, or has been, or will be incarnate, perhaps once, perhaps—for so Browning's always monistic intuitions about the relation of God and the world always suggest to him—perhaps always, perhaps in all our life, perhaps in all men."[214]The doctrine of the incarnation is thus acknowledged to be vital not only for Christianity but for theism as well. "The fact of the Incarnation," as Westcott has said, "gives reality to that moral conception of God as active Love without which Theism becomesa formula."[215]But the meaning of incarnation and its support of theistic belief is weakened in proportion as it is interpreted not in an historical sense but as an incarnation "perhaps always, perhaps in all men."
In his emphasis upon the incarnation and atonement, Royce has shown a profound appreciation of what is vital in Christianity, but his discussion shows also that these doctrines themselves, in being removed from their historic setting and adapted to the requirements of a philosophical theory, may easily lose what is for religion their most vital elements.
Each of our four philosophers has performed an important service for religious thought. Bergson has made an effective protest against materialism. Eucken has asserted the reality of the spiritual world. Ward has strengthened the philosophical foundations of belief in God and immortality. Royce has found in the distinctive ideas of Christianity the crown of religious philosophy.
The deeper thought of our age, judged by its leading exponents, has been working towards Christianity and not in the opposite direction. It has broken away from materialism with its denial of a spiritual world. It has broken away from an idealism which denies personality in God and man. It has been strongly attractedto Christianity, and influenced in its intellectual constructions by the teaching of Christ and of the Apostles. It is at one with Christianity in its ethical standpoint and emphasis. The Cross is no longer foolishness to the Greek, when leaders of philosophic thought find in Christianity their brightest glimpse into the homeland of the spirit, the source of their deepest insights into truth, the inspiration of their most fruitful activity and the key to the solution of their profoundest problems.
Four universals were contained in the last commands of the Risen Christ: "All authority has been given unto me. Go, disciple all the nations, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you all the days." If the marching orders of the Church were to be obeyed, the Christian Faith must be brought into contact and into conflict not only with Judaism but with all the ethnic faiths. If its program is to be carried out successfully, Christianity must supersede all other religions. In this lecture we must consider the relation of Christianity to ancient religions, or those prevalent in the Roman Empire at the time of its founding, and then its relation to modern religions.
I.Christianity and Ancient Religions
That the religion of the cross, which started in a despised and persecuted sect among a people without intellectual or military prestige, should in three centuries become the state religion of the Roman Empire, is often spoken of as themiracle of history. The early missionary could not appeal to military force or to an obviously superior type of civilization, and the wonder is not that Christianity conquered the Roman world but that it ever secured a foothold at all. The familiar argument has been: "We can account for the progress of Christianity, against obstacles and without outward aids, only upon the assumption that a divine power was working within."
Since the rise of the "religious-historical school" in Germany some dozen years ago, the question of Christianity's relation to contemporary religions has come up in a new form, and has been brought into the foreground of theological discussion. The victory of early Christianity, it is asserted, is due to the fact that Paul not merely presented it to the Romans in a juridical form, but that he preached the myth or mystery of a dying and rising Saviour to the myth loving Greeks; and it is even said that the New Testament portrait of Christ, whatever historical reality lies behind it, is in fact a sort of glorified composite photograph made out of the elements of a Jewish Messiah, a Greek Apollo or Adonis and an Egyptian Osiris. The claim is made by the more extreme members of the "religious-historical school" that every feature of Christianity that was supposed to be original, and indeed practically the whole Gospel narrative,can be parallelled closely or remotely in Persian, Hindu, Syrian, Egyptian or Greek religious literature, or in the Old Testament and the teaching of the philosophers.
The reasons for Christianity's triumph over other religions may be still to seek, but its claim to supernatural authority is called in question by the recent movement in scholarship which has taken as its motto, The study of the Christian Faith in the light of the history of religions. "It would be strange indeed," a writer has remarked, "if such parallels did not raise new questionings in the place of old certainties. If the accounts of miraculous births and resurrections are plainly fabulous when we meet with them in other faiths, are they necessarily historical when they occur in the Christian Scriptures? At any rate we feel that stringent evidence will be required to prove them so."[216]
When we study the relation between early Christianity and the religions of the time it is clear that some established principles are needed to control the comparison. When it is discovered, for instance, that Confucius had seventy-two disciples and an inner circle of ten "select ones," and that he spoke the Golden Rule in a negative form, does it follow that the Gospel accounts of the choice of the twelve and of theseventy were borrowed from Confucius? Clemen's formulation of the principles that must govern the comparison will be generally accepted:
(1) "A religious-historical explanation is impossible if it leads to untenable consequences or proceeds from untenable presuppositions. (2) The sense of the New Testament passage, as well as the contents of the non-Jewish idea, must first be fully ascertained. (3) We ought never to assume that ideas of an advanced religion have been altogether borrowed, until we have done our best to discover any germs of them in the native religious literature. (4) The non-Jewish idea that is brought in as an explanation must really in some degree correspond to the Christian one. (5) This element must have been already in existence: an idea that is subsequent in its emergence cannot, of course, have given rise to one previously existent. (6) It must be shown in regard to any foreign idea that it was really in a position to influence Christianity, or Judaism before it, and how."[217]To these might be added that the possibility of coincidence must not be overlooked.
With these principles, most of them self-evident, in our minds, let us glance at the topics of immediate interest in our present field: (1) TheVirgin Birth and its parallels; (2) the worship of Christ and the Emperor-cult; and (3) Christianity and the Mystery Religions.
1. In its relation to the stories of current mythology, the Virgin Birth was a subject of active discussion in the time of the fathers. The patristic apologists make two points in referring to the mythological parallels. On the one hand, the similarity of the Gospel story in its supernatural element to the stories prevalent at the time is appealed to in order to commend it to the acceptance of the Greeks. Thus Justin says: "We propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter."[218]Similarly Origen says: "There is no absurdity in employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks with a view to showing that we are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind."[219]On the other hand, the difference between the Christian and the heathen stories is appealed to as proof of the moral and historical superiority of the Gospel narratives. Justin says that the Virgin conceived "not by intercourse but by power;"[220]and Origen, referring to a tradition about the birth of Plato, says that such stories are "veritable fables."[221]
The notion is popular to-day that stories ofthe birth of a god or a hero from a virgin are common in non-Christian religions, and the remark is heard that the Virgin Birth of Jesus would be credible were it not for these parallels. A closer examination shows, however, that while supernatural births were the common property of most ancient religions, the Virgin Birth was a distinctive and spontaneous feature of Christianity. Thus Clemen remarks that "what we find in Indian thought (at any rate in earlier times) is not a Virgin Birth in the proper sense of that term, but only a miraculous birth, and one of quite a different type from the birth of Jesus."[222]Alluding to the fact that Buddhism was so entirely outside the western range of vision as to be noticed very meagrely in the Greek and Roman literature, Clemen says that "if there are similarities that cannot be accidental between this later Buddhistic literature and the New Testament, the question would arise whether the former could not be dependent upon the latter,"[223]since Christianity penetrated early to India.
Clemen quotes Franckh to the effect that "none of these personages that play the part of a mother-goddess is thought of as a virgin. It isonly in the course of time that Ishtar is everywhere put in the place of the earlier mother-goddesses.... As mother-goddess, Ishtar has no male god who permanently corresponds to her. This is the reason why she is vaguely spoken of as the 'virgin' Ishtar. But it must be emphatically asserted that here the idea of virginity undergoes a vague deflection."[224]
Of the parallels adduced, only two are clearly cases of birth from a virgin: Simon Magus (Clem. Recog.II, 14) and a certain Terebinthus (Acta Archelai et Manetis, c. 52), both of whom claimed to be born from a virgin; but, as Grützmacher remarks, these stories arose under Christian influences and are found in post-Christian writings so that they are not the root but the product of the Gospel narratives;[225]and E. Petersen admits that in these cases there may be a simple taking over of the supernatural birth of Jesus.[226]
In the Græco-Roman myths there is always some fleshly or sensible medium. Both the essential difference in the Gospel narratives, and the lack of any proved avenue of influence leading to these narratives, with their strongly Jewish colouring, from heathen sources, makes the theory of derivation from these sources most improbable.
2. The famous Priene inscription, dated aboutthe year 9b. c., has shown that the titles given to the Emperor Augustus were strikingly similar to those addressed by Christians to Christ. The day of the Emperor's birth was of great significance for the human race; he is called Saviour of men, he is to abolish war and bring general happiness; and the inscription declares that "the birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of tidings of joy on his account."[227]Both religions again, the worship of Christ and the Emperor-cult, were universal religions, the essential difference being that the former excluded, while the latter tolerated, other forms of worship. Did the Christian Church derive its worship of Christ as Lord, or even such titles as "Saviour" and "Lord," from the Emperor-worship of the time?
The deification of a king was by no means an unfamiliar thing in the ancient and especially in the oriental world. The kings of Egypt are said to have worshipped themselves. To the offer of Alexander the Great to rebuild the burnt temple of Diana at Ephesus, the shrewd reply of the priests, not wishing to offend either Persia or Greece, was that it was not fitting for one deity to build the temple of another. The ascription of divine honours to the Emperor was a victory of eastern influences over Roman thought. Emperor worshipwas (1) a compliment to the ruler; (2) a kind of personification of the genius of the Empire, as perhaps in the case of the Mikado to-day; and (3) a convenient neutral religion, since no existing cult could be universal, binding all peoples together in a necessary religious bond. While not taken very seriously by the astute rulers themselves, it may also have been to many minds "an actual breaking out of religious longing," such as seems to be expressed in Vergil's "Fourth Eclogue," for a heaven-sent deliverer and saviour.
To Jews and Christians alike, however, the idea of the worship of the Emperor was in the highest degree abhorrent. This is shown by the fierce opposition to the setting up of the statue of Caligula in the Temple, by the refusal of the early Christians to worship the genius of the Cæsars under pain of death, and by the parallel accounts in the Acts and Josephus of the death of Herod, both Jewish and Christian authors describing his sudden death as a judgment upon his impiety in accepting divine honours. With Paul the "setting himself forth as God" was a mark of the man of sin (2 Thess. ii. 3, 4). It is then improbable in the highest degree that an idea so repellent alike to Jewish and Christian thought could have been in any way responsible for the worship of Christ as divine.
But was it not possible that such titles as"Lord" and "Saviour" should on Gentile soil have been unconsciously taken over by the Christians, suggested to them by the growing use of these terms as addressed to the Emperor and their free ascription to heathen deities? This position has been defended by Bousset, who says that "it was in the air that the first Hellenistic Christian community should give to its cult-hero the title Kyrios (Lord)."[228]Even this theory of an unconscious verbal influence exerted on Gentile soil is full of difficulty. To maintain that the title "Lord" originated in the Gentile-Christian church it is necessary, of course, to discard the evidence of all the documents, the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles. It must be denied that Jesus called Himself Lord, or that the title was given Him in the Jerusalem church. Doubt must be thrown upon the whole record of the apostolic days in the Acts; and the evidence, in Paul's allusion to "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. i. 19), of the use of the title in the Jerusalem church must be ignored.
Bousset's theory is that Paul did not originate the title but found it already in use by the Gentile church. But there is no evidence that at the time of Paul's conversion there was any church on Gentile soil that was not composed, in the main, of former Jews and of Jews who had comefrom Jerusalem. When it is said that "between Paul and the primitive church of Palestine stand the Hellenistic churches in Antioch, Damascus, Tarsus,"[229]it must be remembered that the church at Damascus was composed primarily of Jerusalem Christians who were persecuted to foreign cities; that the church at Antioch was founded by those from Judea, and grew under the leadership of Barnabas, a priest and leader of the Jerusalem church (Acts xi. 19 f.; Gal. ii. 1, 12); and that there is no evidence that there were any Christians at Tarsus until the time of Paul's visit (Acts ix. 30; Gal. i. 21). It is hard to see how there can be any question of an entirely new title spontaneously arising from the heathen environment, and free from the influence of the church at Jerusalem.
If it be asked how Jews could dare to apply the name Kyrios, "the holy cult-name of the Old Testament Jahwe," to Jesus, the answer is suggested by Bousset himself when he says: "Therein lay a piece of monotheistic feeling: God alone should be prayed to and worshipped. This powerful religious feeling, free from all reflection, has once and again in the history of Christological dogma asserted itself."[230]The essence of the matter is that Christian converts both Jewish and Gentile called upon the name of the Lord, and worshipped Him; but it is evidentthat Jesus was first worshipped on Jewish soil as King of Israel, and Lord in the sense made familiar in the Old Testament (Rom. x. 9-13; Acts ii. 17, 21), before He was worshipped on Gentile soil as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Aside from all else it is highly improbable that in the time of Paul's conversion the use of the title Lord (Kyrios, Dominus) as applied to the Emperor was so wide-spread as to have exercised any appreciable influence upon Christianity. "It would after all," Bousset himself acknowledges, "in spite of all analogies in substance and words, be an erroneous and over-hasty inference, were we to bring the Christian Kyrios-cult and its origin into immediate connection with the cult of the Cæsars. In the time and in the regions in which the Kyrios-Jesus cult arose, the worship of the ruler scarcely as yet had possessed so dominating a rôle that the worship of Jesus as Lord must be regarded as having arisen in conscious opposition to it."[231]
The conscious opposition no doubt came later, as Deissmann has suggested, when the cult of the Christ went forth into the Roman world and endeavoured to reserve for itself words which had just been transferred to the deified emperors, or had been invented for that worship. "Thus there arises," he says, "a polemical parallelismbetween the cult of the emperor and the cult of Christ, which makes itself felt where ancient words derived by Christianity from the treasury of the Septuagint and the Gospels happen to coincide with solemn concepts of the Imperial cult which sounded the same or similar."[232]It was inevitable that, as Paul preached Jesus Christ as Lord, the contrast between the Christian worship and the worship of the Cæsars should suggest itself, together with their irreconcilable antagonism. This "polemical parallelism" is probably expressed in such titles as "our only Master and Lord" (Jude 4), "Every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. ii. 11), and "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" (Rev. xix. 16).
3. The relation of Paul to the Mystery Religions of his time is a topic which has of late been actively discussed. A thesis now widely maintained has been expressed by Loisy in an epigrammatic form: "The mystery of Paul's conversion is his conversion to the mysteries." To discuss the question in all its bearings, one would need a general acquaintance with classical literature, a special knowledge of religious conditions in the early Roman Empire, and, most important of all, a first-hand exegetical knowledge of Paul's epistles.
A marked feature of the age in which theApostle lived was a merging of deities, and the practice of oriental cults side by side with the official Roman religion and the worship of the Cæsar. This syncretism was promoted by the tolerance of an official religious indifferentism, and by a pantheistic philosophy which was hospitable to the worship of a multiplicity of deities as aspects of the One and the All. At a time when the Orontes was pouring its waters into the Tiber, the mysteries of the oriental religions were actively propagated in the West and coalesced with the mysteries practiced among the Greeks.
In spite of the labours of philologists and archæologists, our knowledge of the ritual of the various mysteries and even of the ideas symbolized is comparatively slight. It can still be said with Cumont that, "shut out from the sanctuary like profane outsiders, we hear only the indistinct echo of the sacred songs and not even in imagination can we attend the celebration of the mysteries."[233]
The moral effect of the mystery cults is also a matter of some doubt. Plato, as we know (Phædo, 69 D, 81 A), had a high opinion of the Greek mysteries; but the cruel and sensual rites of the oriental religions scandalized the Latin writers as well as the Christian apologists. Even Cumont,who thinks that the mystery cults were superior in their religious appeal and influence to the cold, prosaic and austere Roman religion, admits that by the adoption of the mysteries "barbarous, cruel and obscene practices were undoubtedly spread."[234]It is evident that the oriental religions became spiritualized in course of time, and that the various deities at least of Egypt and of Syria came to be conceived, in accordance with the dominant philosophy, in a henotheistic or pantheistic way. Uhlhorn thinks that oriental worship "with all its distortions was more profound, and contained unconscious presages of the Deity who has indeed in birth and death descended to redeem us."[235]
When Paul preached "the mystery of God which is Christ" (Col. ii. 2), he incorporated into Christianity, it is said, in adapting it to the Gentile world, features which were common to the mystery brotherhoods of the day, and virtually transformed it into a mystery religion. Pauline Christianity, say the extreme advocates of this view, adopted its vocabulary, its missionary methods, its philosophical and religious ideas, its sacraments and symbolism, its mystical experiences and even its organization, from the compound of oriental mysticism and Greek philosophy which was popular in the cities which Paul visited.
The points in dispute will appear if we glance atthe Pauline doctrine of the sacraments, and of dying and rising with Christ, and then at the Pauline vocabulary.
That the ritual of the mysteries had something in common with the Christian sacraments is shown by the fact that the charge of borrowing was made from both sides in early times. The Christian writers accuse the heathen priests of a blasphemous parody of the Christian sacraments inspired by the spirit of lies, and the priests retorted that the sacraments were a plagiarism from the mysteries. Cumont believes that both were much mistaken.
The material for comparison is somewhat meagre because baptism is not prominent in Paul's epistles. He never mentions his own baptism, and, aside from I Corinthians i., in which he says that he was not sent to baptize, he uses the verb in but four passages (I Cor. x. 2; xii. 13; xv. 29; Gal. iii. 27); the noun in two (Eph. iv. 5; Col. ii. 12); and both verb and noun in one passage (Rom. vi. 3-4). In the mysteries there were lustrations with salt water, water of the Nile and sacred water, but little is known of the exact significance of the rituals. Kennedy is not persuaded that it meant regeneration.[236]There was no baptizing "in the name of" the gods.
On the other hand we know little of any sacrificialmeal in the mysteries corresponding to the Eucharist. Reitzenstein observes that unless a happy chance sheds more light upon the use and meaning of the mystery-meals common in most cults, a comparison with the sacraments remains only "a play with possibilities."[237]Clemen thinks that both the institution of the Lord's Supper by Jesus and its continued observance are fully explained without bringing in foreign influences.[238]
It is probable that the mystery cults exerted an influence upon the later development of sacramental doctrine, but this is aside from our question. Thus Wendt would place the influence of the mystery religions upon the Christian sacraments in the post-Pauline age, and thinks that "to Acts we owe the undoubtedly correct tradition that these Christian rites go back to a date preceding the Hellenistic mission of Paul, and must be sought for in the very earliest practice of the Apostolic community."[239]Hatch also believes that between apostolic and post-apostolic times the sacraments were modified in important respects under the influence of the mysteries. "The primitive 'see here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized?' passed into a ritualwhich at every turn recalls the ritual of the mysteries."[240]
Those who push back the influence of the mysteries upon the sacraments to the teaching of Paul himself are compelled to interpret the Apostle's language, contrary, we believe, to the best exegetical tradition, in a physical or what is called anex opere operatosense. It is significant that when the sacraments are so interpreted they appear to be a foreign element in Paul's system. "It is no wonder that interpreters like Heitmüller and Weinel, who attribute a magical view of the sacraments to Paul, are concerned to point out that his sacramentalism is a sort of erratic boulder in his system as a whole."[241]We are reminded of Clemen's principle that the sense of the New Testament passage should be fully ascertained before dependence is assumed.
When von Dobschütz says that "the unique sacramental conception of the Early Church, which has no analogy in the history of religion because it belongs essentially to the Christian religion, has its origin solely in Christian faith and Christian experience,"[242]the same may be said of Paul's doctrine of dying and rising again with Christ. When Paul says "buried with him in baptism" (Rom. vi. 4 and Col. ii. 12), hespeaks of no pantheistic or magical union with the deity such as seemed to dominate the thought of the mysteries, so far as their meaning can be ascertained. In both contexts Paul immediately goes on to exhortation. "Let not sin reign" (Rom. vi. 12), "Seek the things above; mortify your members" (Col. iii. 1-5). It should further be noticed that the passage most relied upon to prove Paul's borrowing from the mysteries (Rom. vi.) was addressed to a church which Paul did not found, composed of both Jewish and Gentile Christians. The doctrine in question was not put forth as a novelty, but is assumed to be known to them: "Are ye ignorant, etc.?" (Rom. vi. 3).
Paul's doctrine of dying and rising with Christ is ethical rather than "metaphysical" or magical or sacramental. It is surprising to find how little sacramental it is. With no allusion to his own baptism or to the Lord's Supper he says, "I have been crucified with Christ. The world is crucified to me and I to the world" (Gal. ii. 20; vi. 14). "Christ died for all, therefore all died" (2 Cor. v. 14). "To know Christ, to be found in him, to be transformed into his death" (Phil. iii. 8 f.). His doctrine is based upon a personal experience of grace, and this is associated with the Cross rather than with the sacraments. The bond which mediated his union with Christ in His death was faith. It was through faith thatthe Spirit is to be received (Gal. iii. 14), and even when he says, "Christ liveth in me," he adds, "I live in the faith of the Son of God" (Gal. ii. 20, and see Eph. iii. 17). He would gain Christ that he might have "the righteousness of God through faith" (Phil. iii. 9). The Cross and not the sacraments was central alike in the Apostle's experience and in his doctrine of dying and rising with Christ, and the bond of union between him and Christ was faith. There was no mystical absorption of personality as in the Hermetic prayers: "Thou art I, and I am thou."
Finally the Pauline mystery was distinguished from the heathen mysteries by its connection with an historical Person. In the Pauline mystery, it has been said, the divine appeared in a "concrete and comprehensible guise," and "this connection of a religious principle with a Person who had walked upon earth and suffered death was a phenomenon of singular power and originality."[243]There is a world of difference between the nature-myths, underlying the mysteries, of the annually dying and rising vegetation gods, without historical reality, and promising to the initiated release from transitoriness and mortality, and the record of Christ who died for our sins, and who being raised from the dead dieth no more. To say that Paul not only conformed the Lord's Supper to the heathen mysteries, butinvented it in imitation of the mysteries, is to accuse him of deliberate misstatement; for in a passage of unusual solemnity (I Cor. xi. 23 ff.), he says that he received it of the Lord, and relates the circumstances of the institution of the Supper by Jesus Himself.
The argument from vocabulary is relied upon by Reitzenstein to prove the influence of heathen ideas upon the thought of the Apostle. It is his theory that Paul spent the two years of inner disturbance, in part at least, in the study of Hellenistic religion and philosophy, and that this influence helped him in the construction of a new religion. In substance Reitzenstein's argument is that Paul shows the use of technical religious terms found in the Hermetic writings, especially in the "Poimandres"; and that the "Poimandres" is to be dated earlier than the "Shepherd" of Hermas; and that the conceptions it embodies were current in the Roman Empire, and in a literary form, in the time of Paul. The argument is twofold, first, that the Hermetic writings were current in the time of Paul, and, second, that Paul shows their influence in his vocabulary. As the date of the "Poimandres," the most important of the Hermetic writings, is in dispute, the latter point may be considered first.
In the Pauline vocabulary Reitzenstein believes that we have "an absolutely certain proof of the immediate influence of Hellenism uponthe Apostle, and at the same time a measure of its strength."[244]"Only when the existence and meaning of a religious literature in Hellenism is assured and the sort of linguistic dependence is seen to depend on literary mediation is the opportunity of an explanation afforded."[245]Many words thought to be characteristically Pauline are said to have been technical terms in the popular mystery cults of the day, before the Apostle adopted them as the expression of his own religious teaching.
Without attempting to follow the argument in detail, we may observe (a) that Paul uses many of these terms in a different sense from that of the Hermetic literature. Compare, for example, Paul's use of familiar words such as "salvation," "glory," "grace," with that of the Magic Papyri. In "Hermes-Prayer I," the petition is for "health, salvation, prosperity, glory, victory, power, loveliness."[246]So in "Prayer II," "Give me grace, food, victory, good luck, loveliness, etc."[247]Again in "Hermes-Prayer III," we read, "Save me always from drugs and deceit, and all witchcraft and evil tongues and all trouble, from all hate both of Gods and men. Give me grace andvictory and business and success; for Thou art I, and I am Thou.... I am thy image."[248]In these prayers from the later Hermes-Thot religion, the Pauline terms are evidently used in a worldly sense, contrasting strongly with their use by Paul.
(b) Much of the technical phraseology common to Paul and the Hermetic literature is current in the Old Testament; and with the language of the Old Testament we know that Paul's mind was saturated. Clemen's maxim should be observed, and we should seek the source of an idea (or word) in the native religion before going farther afield. Thus before Paul's doctrine of the Spirit is assigned with confidence to Hellenistic sources, the use of the term Spirit both in the Old Testament and in pre-Pauline Christianity should be studied. Paul quotes the passage from Joel which promises the outpouring of the Spirit (Rom. x. 13 f.; see Acts ii. 21). He brings the Spirit into connection with the blessing of Abraham (Gal. iii. 14). The Spirit is also mentioned in the introduction to the ministry of Jesus alike by Mark and by the non-Markan source. A sufficient and natural explanation of Paul's doctrine of the Spirit is to be found in the Old Testament, in Evangelical tradition and in the experience of the church at Pentecost, and in his own experience. When Paul speaks of "theSpirit of adoption whereby we cry, 'Abba, Father'" (Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 6), we have to do not with remote literary influences nor with the dry bones of any technical theology, Hebraic or Hermetic, but with the heart-throb of personal experience.
Reitzenstein believes that the Pauline vocabulary is best explained by the Hellenistic parallels, but he recognizes that the parallelism with the Old Testament should be considered. Thus while he thinks that he has shown parallels for all the Pauline uses of the wordpneuma, he says "whether with equal ease all may be explained from the Hebraic use ofruachandnepheshor the use ofpneumain the Septuagint the theologian must decide."[249]Harnack, with some irony, advises Reitzenstein and his school to gain a clearer knowledge of Paul the Jew and Paul the Christian before they take account of secondary elements which he borrowed from the Greek mysteries. A conscious acceptance, he thinks, of such elements is out of the question.[250]