scope, was capable of increase. Within the Classical religion multiplication was the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for men could practise these cults without belonging to them. There were no communities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation — that is, the Polis.
In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion — the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, "when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." It is self-evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false.[1] The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly. The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church — in fact, it is the Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the centre of gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in the creed.
As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis of all the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued. This is a most important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion enters in the shape of the Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as the cults of the star-gods and Baals (Jupiter Dolichenus, Sabazius, Sol Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion in the form of a Yahweh-cult (for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian communities of the Ptolemaic period[2]), and primitive Early-Christianity too — as the Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show — took substance as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions (which from about Hadrian's time drove the genuine old Classical deities completely into the background) might proclaim itself as the revelation of the one true faith — Isis styled herself deorum dearumque facies uniformis — in reality they carry, one and all, marks of the Classical separatism — that is, they multiply to infinity; every community stands for itself and is local; all the temples, catacombs, Mithræa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in
- ↑ Not "non-existent." It would be a misconception of the Magian world-feeling to attach a Faustian-dynamic meaning to the phrase "true God." In combating the worship of godlings, the reality of godlings and dæmons is presupposed. The Israelite prophets never dreamed of denying the Baals, and similarly Isis and Mithras for the Early Christians, Jehovah for the Christian Marcion, Jesus for the Manichæans, are devilish, but perfectly real, powers. Disbelieving in them would have had no meaning for the Magian soul — what was required was that one should not turn to them. To use an expression now long current, it is "Henotheism" and not Monotheism.
- ↑ Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, III, 499; Wendland, Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur, p. 191.
