Note 31.1 — The Evolution of Religion

I turn now to the second group of affinities, those in nomenclature and terminology. This may at first sight appear a matter unimportant for the evolution of religion, and of merely linguistic concern. A people changing its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, but must adapt the old terminology to the new thought. It may be of interest for the student of language to know that when St Paul promises to “show you a mystery” he is borrowing the language of paganism; that when Bishop Clemens31.1 ecstatically exclaims, “The Lord is our hierophant; bearing the sacred torch He has marked the initiate with His own seal… once join our mystery and you will dance in the choir of angels,” he is using the phraseology of the Eleusinian and Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a style, upon which Dr Hatch has sufficiently commented, is more than linguistic; for it foreshadows a real though fortunately a temporary change which came over Christianity in the first few centuries of its life, transforming it from an open doctrine into a mystery organised after the old Greek type. Moreover the modern logical view of names as merely indifferent speech-symbols, which can be changed without affecting the essence of the things, was by no means the old-world view. The formula nomina sunt numina was valid in all the old religions of the Mediterranean area, including earlier and even later Christianity: the divine name was felt to be part of the divine essence and itself of supernatural potency; and this will be seen to be of paramount importance when we consider the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore the propagation of a new religion was greatly assisted if it could allow itself to employ some at least of the names potent and familiar in the older creed. Now the personal names of the various deities of paganism, owing to the mental illusion noted above, were necessarily hateful to the new faith and were ruthlessly suppressed, surviving merely as names of demons or for purposes of magic: only in remote corners of the old world one or two may still be lingering, purified as it were and at peace, as in the modern chapel of “Panagia Aphroditissa,” near the old Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred names of Greek paganism were mere appellatives, possessing less individual personality, and were therefore innocent in the ears of the Christian propagandists. And two of these were destined to become names of primary virtue in the terminology of the new faith. When the apostles and their successors preached the Gospel of “the Saviour,” this title could awaken at least a responsive religious thrill in the hearts of the Hellenes who had been nursed in their ancestral religion. For it had long been attached to their supreme god, and in its feminine form to their beloved goddess Kore, and as applied to her the appellative already connoted “salvation” after death;33.1 and already it had been used by the Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the divine man, God’s representative on earth, “the living image of God,” as one of the later Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language of the Rosetta inscription.34.1 But in the history of divine names none have been of greater import for paganism and Christianity alike than “Kore-Parthenos” and that of the Greek and Phrygian “Divine Mother,” the θεῶν Μήτηρ. It is at least probable that the prevalence of the cult and the name of “Kore,” the goddess who proffered salvation in the pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded strong stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of Mariolatry, which is one of those phenomena in the history of the Church which cannot be adequately explained without looking beyond the limits of Christianity proper. A passage in the Panarium of Epiphanios34.2 is of singular interest for those who wish to study the period of transition between old things and new. This writer tells us that on the night of the 5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, the worshippers met in the sacred enclosure or temple of “Kore,” and having sung hymns to the music of the flute till dawn, they descended by the light of torches into an underground shrine and brought up thence a wooden idol on a bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with the sign of the cross on her brow, her hands, and her knees. And with the accompaniment of flutes, hymns, and dances the image was carried round the central shrine seven times, before it was restored again to its nether dwelling-place: “and the votaries say that to-day at this hour Kore—that is, the Virgin—gave birth to the Eternal.”