The influence of the Greek mysteries upon Christianity is a keenly debated question, in which passion and prejudice play too large a part. The information necessary for forming a judgement has been much enlarged by recent discoveries in Egypt and elsewhere, and, as usually happens, the importance of the new facts has been sometimes exaggerated. Protestant theology has on the whole minimized the influence of the mysteries, and has post-dated it, from an unwillingness to allow that there was already a strong Catholic element in the Christianity of the first century. Orthodox Catholicism has ignored it from different but equally obvious motives. Modernist Catholicism has in my opinion antedated the irruption of crude sacramentalism into the Church, and has greatly overstated its importance in the religion of the first-century Christians. This school practically denies anything more than a half-accidental continuity between the preaching of the historical Christ, whom they strangely suppose to have been a mere apocalyptist, one of the many Messiahs or Mahdis who arose at this period in Palestine, and the Catholic Church, which according to them belonged to the same type of religion as the worship of Isis and Mithra. Another bone of contention is the value of the mystery-religions of Greece. The very able German scholars who have written on the subject, such as Reitzenstein and still more Rohde, seem to me much too unsympathetic in their treatment of the mystery-cults. Lastly, some competent critics have lately urged that this side of Christianity owed more to Judaism—Hellenized Judaism, of course—than has been hitherto supposed.
Plato in the Phaedo says that ‘those who established our mysteries declare that all who come to Hades uninitiated will lie in the mud; while he who has been purified and initiated will dwell with the gods’. For, as they say in the mysteries, ‘Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the inspired’. This sacramentalism was not unchallenged, as we have already seen from Plato himself. Diogenes is said to have asked whether the robber Pataecion was better off in the other world than the hero Epaminondas, because the former had been initiated, and the latter had not. But Orphism, though liable to degradation, purified and elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss Harrison says, the Bacchanals hoped to attain unity with God by intoxication, the Orphics by abstinence. The way to salvation was now through ‘holiness’ (ὁσιοτης). To the initiated the assurance was given, ‘Happy and blessed one! Thou shalt be a god instead of a mortal.’ To be a god meant for a Greek simply to be immortal; the Orphic saint was delivered from the painful cycle of recurring births and deaths. And Orphic purity was mainly, though not entirely, the result of moral discipline. Cumont says that the mystery-cults brought with them two new things—mysterious means of purification by which they proposed to cleanse away the defilements of the soul, and the assurance that an immortality of bliss would be the reward of piety. The truth, says Mr. H. A. Kennedy, was presented to them in the guise of divine revelations, esoteric doctrines to be carefully concealed from the gaze of the profane, doctrines which placed in their hands a powerful apparatus for gaining deliverance from the assaults of malicious demonic influences, and above all for overcoming the relentless tyranny of fate. This demonology was believed everywhere under the Roman empire, the period of which Mr. Kennedy is thinking in this sentence, and it has unfortunately left more traces in St. Paul’s epistles than we like to allow. The formation of brotherhoods for mystic worship was also an important step in the development of Greek religion. These brotherhoods were cosmopolitan, and seem to have flourished especially at great seaports. They were thoroughly popular, drawing most of their support from the lower classes, and within them national and social distinctions were ignored. Their ultimate aim cannot be summed up better than in Mr. Kennedy’s words—‘to raise the soul above the transiency of perishable matter through actual union with the Divine’. It has been usual to distinguish between the dignified and officially recognized mysteries, like those of Eleusis, and the independent voluntary associations, some of which became important. But there was probably no essential difference between them. In neither case was there much definite teaching; the aim, as Aristotle says, was to produce a certain emotional state (ου μαθειν τι δειν αλλα παθειν). A passion-play was enacted amid the most impressive surroundings, and we need not doubt that the moral effect was beneficial and sometimes profound. When the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris were fused with the Hellenic, a type of worship was evolved which was startlingly like Christianity. A famous Egyptian text contains the promise: ‘As truly as Osiris lives, shall he [the worshipper] live; as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die.’ The thanksgiving to Isis at the end of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius is very beautiful in itself, though it is an odd termination of a licentious novel. The Hermetic literature also contains doctrine of a markedly Johannine type, as notably in a prayer to Isis: ‘Glorify me, as I have glorified the name of thy son Horus.’ I agree with those critics (Cumont, Zielinski, and others) who attach the ‘higher’ Hermetic teaching to genuinely Hellenic sources. But it is not necessary to ascribe all the higher teaching to Greece and the lower to Egypt.
Much of St. Paul’s theology belongs to the same circle of ideas as these mysteries. Especially important is the psychology which divides human nature into spirit, soul, and body, spirit being the divine element into which those who are saved are transformed by the ‘knowledge of God’. This knowledge is a supernatural gift, which (in the Poimandres) confers ‘deification’. St. Paul usually prefers ‘Pneuma’ as the name of this highest part of human nature; in the Hermetic literature it is not easy to distinguish between Pneuma and Nous, which holds exactly the same place in Neoplatonism. The notion of salvation as consisting in the knowledge of God is not infrequent in St. Paul; compare, for example, 1 Cor. xiii. 12 and a still more important passage, Phil. ii. 8–10. This knowledge was partly communicated by visions and revelations, to which St. Paul attributed some importance; but on the whole he is consistent in treating knowledge as the crown and consummation of faith. The pneumatic transformation of the personality is the centre of St. Paul’s eschatology. ‘Though our outward man perish, our inward man is renewed day by day.’ The ‘spiritual body’ is the vehicle of the transformed personality; for ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’. The expression ‘to be born again’ is common in the mystery literature.
It would be easy to find many other parallels in St. Paul’s epistles, in the Johannine books which are the best commentary upon them, and in the theology of the Greek Fathers, which prove the close connexion of early Christianity with the mystery-religions of the empire. Twenty years ago it might have been worth while to draw out these resemblances in greater detail, even in so summary a survey as this. But at present the tendency is, if not to over-estimate the debt of the Christian religion to Hellenistic thought and worship, at any rate to ignore the great difference between the higher elements in the mystery-religions, which the new faith could gladly and readily assimilate, and the lower type, the theosophy, magic, and theurgy, which was not in the line of Hellenic development, and is not to be found in the New Testament. Wendland, always a judicious critic, has said very truly that St. Paul stands to the mystery-religions as Plato to Orphism; they are not the centre of his religious life, but they gave him effective forms of expression for his religious experience. Or, as Weinel says, ‘St. Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit and of Christ is not an imitation of mystery-doctrine, but inmost personal experience metaphysically interpreted after the manner of his time.’ Writers like Loisy, who say that for St. Paul Jesus was ‘a Saviour God, after the manner of Osiris, Attis, or Mithra’, and who proceed to draw out obvious parallels between the sufferings, death, and resurrection of these mythological personages and the gospels of the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a ‘Saviour God’. Even more perverse are the arguments which are used to prove that the centre of St. Paul’s religion was a gross and materialistic sacramental magic. The apostle, whose antipathy to ritual in every shape is stamped upon all his writings, who thanks God that he baptized very few of the Corinthians, who declares that ‘Christ sent him not to baptize but to preach the Gospel’, is accused of regarding baptism as ‘an opus operatum which secures a man’s admission into the kingdom apart from the character of his future conduct’. And yet in the Epistle to the Romans, as Weinel says, ‘baptism