Chapter II · THE ALEXANDRIAN DIVINITIES (continued 2)

It is plain, however, that, by the time Apuleius wrote, the 79necessity for any such shifts had passed away. The Alexandrian religion had then become a state religion, and was served by a fully organized and powerful priesthood. As there were not less than seven temples of Isis in Rome itself, the number of the Roman faithful must have been very considerable, and on their offerings and the gifts of the state, a large staff of priests was maintained. We hear not only of a high priest in each temple to whom all the lesser ministers of the cult were apparently subject^[257], but of hierophants, scribes, stolists or wardrobe-keepers, singing-men and singing-women, and a host of subordinate functionaries down to the neocoros or temple-sweeper and the cliduchos or guardian of the keys. Women as well as men were eligible for some of these offices, and the inscriptions tell us of a female oneirocrites or interpreter of dreams and of several canephorae or carriers of the sacred basket, besides many priestesses whose functions are not defined^[258]. The high priest and the more important officers lived in the temple and probably devoted their whole time to its service^[259]; but the lesser offices seem to have been capable of being held concurrently with lay occupations, like that of the churchwardens at the present day. But one and all were devoted to the faith and its propagation, and formed in the words of Apuleius “a sacred soldiery” for its extension and defence. It is probable that they were all drawn in the first instance from the ranks of the initiates only.

These were what may be called the secular clergy of the Alexandrian Church; but there was in addition a body of devotees attached to it whose mode of life singularly reminds us of that afterwards adopted by the Christian monks. A lucky chance has revealed to us some fragments of papyrus found on the site of the Serapeum at Memphis, which contain among other things the petitions of a Macedonian named Ptolemy the son of Glaucias to King Ptolemy VI Philometor 80about the year 166 B.C.^[260] From these it is evident that there were at that time a body of recluses lodged in the Serapeum who were vowed to a seclusion so complete that they might not stir forth from their cells under any pretence, and when the king visited Memphis he had to speak with his namesake and petitioner through the window of the latter’s chamber. These recluses were in some way devoted to the service of the god, and their stay in the temple was to all appearance voluntary, although in Ptolemy’s case, it had at the time he wrote lasted already fifteen years. He does not seem to have been driven to this by poverty, as he speaks of a considerable property left him by his father; and as the object of his petitions is to champion the rights of two priestesses of Serapis who had been wrongfully deprived of their dues of bread and oil by the officials of the temple, he seems to have been in some sort given to the performance of “good works.” How he otherwise occupied his time, and whether his title or description of κάτοχος implied any connection with the oracle of Serapis is still a disputed point. Yet the correspondence in which his name appears shows clearly the existence within the Serapeum of a large population of both men and women living at the expense of the temple revenues, some of whom took part in the ritual of the services there celebrated, while others were fixed by their own vows in the strictest seclusion. Whichever way the controversy alluded to above is decided, it seems plain that there is here a parallel between the practice of the Catholic Church with its division of the clergy into regular and secular and the Alexandrian 81religion, which until the discovery of the papyri some fifty years ago was entirely unsuspected.

It has been said above that the Alexandrian religion reached its apogee in the time of the Antonines. How it came to decline in power cannot be traced with great exactness, but it seems probable that it only lost its hold on the common people from the greater attractions presented by other religions competing with it for the popular favour. Other cults began to press in from the East, including the worship of Mithras, which in the time of Diocletian finally supplanted it in the favour of the state, and acquired perhaps a stronger hold on the army from reasons to be examined in detail when we come to deal with the Mithraic religion. But the rise of Christianity is in itself sufficient to account for its decline in popularity among the lower classes of the Empire. To them the Catholic Church, purged and strengthened by a sporadic and intermittent persecution, offered advantages that the Alexandrian religion could never give. In this last, the possession of wealth must always have assured its possessor a disproportionate rank in the religion, and without the expenditure of a large sum of money, it was impossible, as we have seen, to arrive at its most cherished secrets. Nor do we find in any of the few documents of the faith that have come down to us any parallel to that wide and all-embracing spirit of charity which in its early days made the Christian Church a kind of mutual benefit society for all who were willing to enter into her fold. To the poorest as to the wealthiest, the Catholic Church, too, always held out the promises of a faith to be understood by all and free from the mystery with which the cardinal doctrines of the Alexandrians were shrouded from all but the highest initiates. Its promises of happiness beyond the grave also were extended to even the most degraded, and the fulfilment of them was taught to be dependent on conduct within the reach of even the pauper or the repentant criminal rather than on the long, difficult and expensive course of instruction which its rival demanded. Nor were more material inducements neglected. The highest offices within the Church were open to the lowest of its members, and it was quite possible for a slave or a freedman to ascend the chair 82of Peter, there to negotiate on equal terms with emperors and proconsuls. Unlike the religions of the ancient world which were first converted by Alexander’s conquests from national into universal cults, the Christian religion was from its foundation organized on the democratic lines laid down in the text: “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant^[261].” Moreover, the predictions of the Christian missionaries as to the immediate coming of the Second Advent began to spread among the masses outside the Church, and found a soil ready to receive them in the minds of superstitious men trampled on by the rich, harried by the tax-gatherers, and torn this way and that by constant insurrections and civil wars stirred up, not by the Roman mob (kept quiet as it was with State doles) but by its too ambitious masters. Quite apart from the spiritual comfort that it brought to many, and from the greater unity and simplicity of its doctrines, we can hardly wonder that the proletariat everywhere turned eagerly to the new faith.

The effect of this upon the Alexandrian religion must have been fatal. Unfortunately the destruction of pagan literature has been so great that we know hardly anything about its decline from the mouths of its adherents^[262]. What we are able to perceive is that the persons who adhered to the Alexandrian faith after the time of the Antonines generally practised many other religions as well. Alexander Severus had in his palace a lararium or private chapel in which, like most of the later Roman emperors, he placed statues of the gods whose worship he particularly affected. We find there Serapis and Isis, indeed, but surrounded with a great crowd of other divinities together with the images of philosophers like Socrates and Apollonius of Tyana, and—if the Augustan History is to be believed—that 83of the Founder of Christianity Himself^[263]. So, too, the funeral inscription of Ulpius Egnatius Faventinus, an augur of high rank who flourished in the reign of Valens and Valentinian, records that the dead nobleman was a priest of Isis, but a hierophant of Hecate, a hieroceryx of Mithras, and a “chief Herdsman” of Bacchus as well. So, again, Fabia Aeonia Paullina, wife of Vettius Praetextatus, a Prefect and Consul Designate of about the same period, describes herself on her tombstone as consecrated at Eleusis to Dionysos, Demeter, and Persephone, and a hierophantis of Hecate, but merely a worshipper of Isis^[264]. We see here a great change from the exclusive fervour of Apuleius’ Lucius, who thinks it only just that Isis should require him to devote his whole life to her service.

But a violent end was soon to be put even to the public exercise of the Alexandrian religion. The conversion of Constantine had left it unharmed, and we find Julian writing to the Alexandrians during his brief reign as if the supremacy of their religion in Egypt’s capital at any rate was assured^[265]. But under Theodosius, an order was obtained from the Emperor for the demolition of the “heathen” temples at Alexandria, and Theophilus, “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue^[266],” who was bishop of the city at the time, was not the man to allow the decree to remain a dead letter. According to the ecclesiastical historians^[267], he began operations on the temple of Dionysos, which he converted into a Christian church. In the course of doing so, he professed to have discovered certain emblems of virility which seem to have been used in the Mysteries to illustrate the legend of the Diaspasm or tearing in pieces of the god, and these he had paraded through the city as evidence of what the heathens, according to him, worshipped in secret. The same emblems were also used in the worship of Isis, where 84they probably were shown to initiates as explaining the loss of the generative power by Osiris after his death and passion^[268]. Hence their profanation was in the highest degree offensive to the last adherents of the Alexandrian religion, who, few in number but formidable from their position and influence, threw themselves into the world-famed Serapeum and determined to resist the decree by force of arms. The Christian mob of Alexandria, hounded on by the bishop and his monks, assaulted the temple which the philosopher Olympius and his followers had converted into a temporary fortress, and many attacks were repulsed with loss of life to the besiegers. At length, a truce having been negotiated until the Emperor could be communicated with, a fresh decree was obtained in which the defenders of the temple were promised a pardon for their share in the riot, if the Serapeum were quietly given up to the authorities. This offer was accepted, and Theophilus had the pleasure of seeing Bryaxis’ colossal statue of Serapis demolished under his own eyes without the event being followed by the predicted earthquake and other catastrophes which we are told the Christians as well as the heathens confidently expected. The magnificent Serapeum with all its wealth of statues and works of art was destroyed, and a church dedicated to the Emperor Arcadius was afterwards erected on its site.

Thus in the year 391, the chief seat and place of origin of the Alexandrian religion was laid waste, and the religion itself perished after a successful reign of seven centuries. Ecclesiastical writers say that this was followed by the conversion of several of the “Hellenists” or adherents of the worship of Serapis and Isis to Christianity^[269], and there seems every likelihood that the story is founded on fact. Is this the reason why we find so many of the external usages of Isis-worship preserved in or revived by the Catholic Church? Macaulay, in speaking of the contest between Catholicism and Protestantism at the Reformation compares it to the fight between Hamlet and Laertes where the combatants change weapons. The comparative study of religions shows that the phenomenon is more widespread than he thought, and that when one religion finally 85supplants another, it generally takes over from its predecessor such of its usages as seem harmless or praiseworthy. The traditional policy of the Catholic Church in this respect was declared by Saint Gregory the Great, when he told the apostle to the Saxon heathens that such of their religious and traditional observances as could by any means be harmonized with orthodox Christianity were not to be interfered with^[270], and this was probably the policy pursued with regard to the converts from the worship of Serapis. Gibbon^[271] has painted for us in a celebrated passage the astonishment which “a Tertullian or a Lactantius” would have felt could he have been raised from the dead to witness the festival of some popular saint or martyr in a Christian church at the end of the fifth century. The incense, the flowers, the lights, and the adoration of the relics of the saint would all, we are told, have moved his indignation as the appanage of heathenism. Yet none of these things would have been found in a temple like that of Delphi, where probably no more than one worshipper or sacred embassy penetrated at a time, and where nothing like congregational worship was known. It was, however, the mode of worship to which the Hellenistic world had become daily accustomed during the seven centuries that the Alexandrian religion had endured, and it is not to be wondered at that the converts brought it with them into their new faith. The worship of the Virgin as the Theotokos or Mother of God which was introduced into the Catholic Church about the time of the destruction of the Serapeum, enabled the devotees of Isis to continue unchecked their worship of the mother goddess by merely changing the name of the object of their adoration, and Prof. Drexler gives a long list of the statues of Isis which thereafter were used, sometimes with unaltered attributes, as those of the Virgin Mary^[272]. The general use of images, the suspension in the churches of ex voto representations of different parts of the human body in gratitude for miraculous 86cures of maladies^[273], and the ceremonial burning of candles, may also be traced to the same source; while the institution of monachism which had taken a great hold on Christian Egypt, is now generally attributed to St Pachomius, who had actually been in his youth a recluse of Serapis^[274]. Prof. Bury, who thinks the action of the earlier faith upon the later in this respect undeniable, would also attribute the tonsure of the Catholic priesthood to a reminiscence of the shaven crowns of the initiates of Isis, to which we may perhaps add the covering of women’s heads in churches^[275].

These instances are for the most part fairly well known, and some have been made use of in controversy between Protestants and Catholics; but it is probable that there were also many resemblances between the external usages of the two faiths which would, when they flourished side by side, strike even the superficial observer, but the traces of which are now well nigh lost^[276]. “Those who worship Serapis are Christians, and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are vowed to Serapis,” wrote the Emperor Hadrian^[277] from Alexandria on his visit there in A.D. 124, and this would possibly explain the respectful and almost mournful tone in which, as Renan noted, the Christian Sibyl announces to Serapis and Isis the end of their reign^[278]. It is not impossible that the resemblance which thus deceived the Emperor was connected with the celebration of 87the Eucharist among certain sects of Christians^[279]. The Adoration of the Sacred Water as the emblem of Osiris, which we have seen represented on the Herculaneum fresco, has many points in common with the exhibition of the Sacrament of the Mass to the people, and it is possible that the words of consecration were not altogether different in the two cases. “Thou art wine, yet thou art not wine, but the members of Osiris,” says a magic papyrus in the British Museum in the midst of an address to “Asklepios of Memphis,” the god Esculapius being one of the gods with whom Serapis in his day of power was most often confounded^[280]. So, too, M. Revillout has published an amatorium or love-charm in which the magician says, “May this wine become the blood of Osiris^[281].” It is true he sees in it a blasphemous adaptation of the Christian rite; but this is very unlikely. It has been shown elsewhere^[282] that many—perhaps all—of the words used in the ceremonial magic of the period are taken from the rituals of religions dying or extinct, and the papyrus, which dates somewhere about the IVth century A.D., may possibly 88have here preserved for us a fragment of the ritual in use in the Alexandrian temples. “Give him, O Osiris, the cooling water” is the epitaph often written by the worshippers of Isis on the tombs of the dead^[283], and it may seem that we have here a hint of mystic communion with the deity brought about by the drinking of his emblem.

The resemblances between the Alexandrian and the Christian religion thus sketched, refer, however, merely to matters which are either external or superficial, or which, like the worship of the Virgin, the use of images and relics, and the institution of monachism, could be abandoned, as was the case at the German Reformation, without necessarily drawing with them the repudiation of the cardinal tenets of Christianity. That the Christian Church owed at her inception any of her more fundamental doctrines to the Alexandrian religion is not only without proof, but is in the highest degree unlikely. The Apostles and missionaries of the Apostolic Age, living as they did in daily expectation of the return of their Risen Lord, had no need to go to an alien faith for the assertion of His divinity, of the truth of His resurrection, or of His power of salvation; nor do the Fathers of the Ante-Nicene Church speak of Serapis and Isis as entitled to any peculiar reverence or as differing in any respect from the other gods of the heathen. Whether the tenets of the Alexandrian religion may not have had some influence on the discussions which raged round the definition of the Divine nature and attributes at the earlier Ecumenical and other Councils of the Church is another matter. The conception of the Supreme Being as a triune god was a very old one in Egypt, and reappeared, as we have seen, unchanged in the worship of Serapis, Isis, and Horus. “Thus from one god I became three gods,” says Osiris in his description of his self-creation in a papyrus dated twelve years after the death of Alexander^[284]; and the dividing-line between the three persons of the Alexandrian triad is so often overstepped that it is plain that their more cultured worshippers at one time considered 89them as but varying forms of one godhead^[285]. Hence, the Trinitarian formulas set out in the Creeds of Nicaea and of St Athanasius would be less of a novelty to those familiar with the Alexandrian religion than to those brought up in the uncompromising monotheism of the Jews. Too little is known of the steps by which the full assertion of the doctrine of the Trinity was reached for any discussion of the matter to be here profitable^[286]. The deepest influence that the Alexandrian religion exercised upon the Church was probably not direct, but through those scattered and heretical sects which, although finally condemned and anathematized by her, yet ever acted as feeders by whom she obtained converts from among the heathen. To these we may now turn our attention.

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