CHAPTER IX, RELIGION AND MORALITY—CONCLUSION
It might be said that a religion—the expression of man's relation to
the unseen—has not necessarily any connection with morality—man's
action in himself and towards his neighbours: that an individual—or
even a nation—might perfectly fulfil the duties imposed by the
'powers above,' without being influenced in conduct and character.
Such a view might seem to find an apt illustration in the religion of
Rome: the ceremonial pietas towards the gods appears to have little
to do with the making of man or nation. But in the history of the
world the test of religions must be their effect on the character of
those who believed in them: religion is no doubt itself an outcome of
character, but it reacts upon it, and must either strengthen or
weaken. We are not therefore justified in dismissing the 'Religion of
Numa' without inquiry as to its relation to morality, for on our
answer to that question must largely depend our judgment as to its
value.
We are of course in a peculiarly difficult position to grapple with
this problem through lack of contemporary evidence. The Rome we know,
in the epochs when we can fairly judge of character and morality, was
not the Rome in which the 'Religion of Numa' had grown up and remained
unquestioned: it had been overlaid with foreign cults and foreign
ideas, had been used by priests and magistrates as a political
instrument, and discounted among the educated through the influence of
philosophy. But we may remember in the first place that even then,
especially in the household and in the country, the old religion had
probably a much firmer hold than one might imagine from literary
evidence, in the second that national character is not the growth of a
day, so that we may safely refer permanent characteristics to the
period when the old religion held its own.
It may be admitted at once that the direct influence on morality was
very small indeed. There was no table of commandments backed by the
religious sanction: the sense of 'sin,' except through breach of
ritual, was practically unknown. It is true that in the very early
leges regiae some notion of this kind is seen—a significant glimpse
of what the original relation may have been: it is there ordained that
the patron who betrayed his client, or the client who deceived his
patron, shall be condemned to Iuppiter; the parricide to the spirits
of his dead ancestors, the husband who sells his wife to the gods of
the underworld, the man who removes his neighbour's landmark to
Terminus, the stealer of corn to Ceres. All these persons shall be
sacri: they have offended against the gods and the gods will see to
their punishment. But these are old-world notions which soon passed
into the background and the state took over the punishment of such
offenders in the ordinary course of law. Nor again in the prayers of
men to gods is there a trace of a petition for moral blessings: the
magistrate prays for the success and prosperity of the state, the
farmer for the fertility of his crops and herds, even the private
individual, who suspends his votive-tablet in the temple, pays his due
for health or commercial success vouchsafed to himself or his
relations. 'Men call Iuppiter greatest and best,' says Cicero,
'because he makes us not just or temperate or wise, but sound and
healthy and rich and wealthy.' Still less, until we come to the
moralists of the Empire, is there any sense of that immediate and
personal relation of the individual to a higher being, which is really
in religion, far more than commandments and ordinances, the mainspring
and safeguard of morality: even the conception of the Genius, the
'nearest' perhaps of all unseen powers, had nothing of this feeling in
it, and it may be significant that, just because of his nearness to
man, the Genius never quite attained to god-head. As far as direct
relation is concerned, religion and morality were to the Roman two
independent spheres with a very small point of contact.
Nor even in its indirect influence does the formal observance of the
Roman worship seem likely at first sight to have done much for
personal or national morality. Based upon fear, stereotyped in the
form of a legal relationship, religio—'the bounden
obligation'—made, no doubt, for a kind of conscientiousness in its
adherents, but a cold conscientiousness, devoid of emotion and
incapable of expanding itself to include other spheres or prompt to a
similar scrupulousness in other relations. The rigid and constant
distinction of sacred and profane would incline the Roman to fulfil
the routine of his religious duty and then turn, almost with a sigh
of relief, to the occupations of normal life, carrying with him
nothing more than the sense of a burden laid aside and a pledge of
external prosperity. Even the religious act itself might be without
moral significance: as we have seen, the worshipper might be wholly
ignorant of the character, even the name of the deity he worshipped,
and in any case the motive of his action was naught, the act itself
everything. Nor again had the Roman religion any trace of that
powerful incentive to morality, a doctrine of rewards and punishments
in a future life: the ideas as to the fate of the dead were
fluctuating and vague, and the Roman was in any case much more
interested in their influence on himself than in their possible
experiences after death.
The divorce then between religion and morality seems almost complete
and it is not strange that most modern writers speak of the Roman
religion as a tiresome ritual formalism, almost wholly lacking in
ethical value. And yet it did not present itself in this light to the
Romans themselves. Cicero, sceptic as he was, could speak of it as the
cause of Rome's greatness; Augustus, the practical politician, could
believe that its revival was an essential condition for the renaissance of the Roman character. Have we, in our brief examination
of its characteristics, seen any features which may suggest the
solution of this apparent antagonism? Was there in this formalism a
life which escapes us, as we handle the dry bones of antiquarianism?
In the first place there may be a danger that we underrate the value
of formalism itself. It spells routine, but routine is not without
value in the strengthening of character. The private citizen, who
conscientiously day by day had carried out the worship of his
household gods and month by month observed the sacred abstinence from
work on the days of festival, was certainly not less fitted to take
his place as a member of a strenuous and well-organised community, or
to serve obediently and quietly in the army on campaign. Even the
magistrate in the execution of his religious duties must have acquired
an exactness and method, which would not be valueless in the conduct
of public business. And when we pass to the origin of this
formalism—the legal relation—the connection with the Roman character
becomes at once more obvious. The 'lawgivers of the world,' who
developed constitution and code to a systematised whole such as
antiquity had not dreamed of before, imported, we may say if we like,
their legal notions into the sphere of religion: but we must not
forget the other side of the question. The permanence and success of
this greater contract with higher powers—the feeling that the gods
did regard and reward exact fulfilment of duty—cannot have been
without re-action on the relations of the life of the community: it
was, as it were, a higher sanction to the legal point of view: a
pledge that the relations of citizen and state too were rightly
conceived. 'There is,' says Cicero, speaking of the death of Clodius
in the language of a later age, 'there is a divine power which
inspired that criminal to his own ruin: it was not by chance that he
expired before the shrine of the Bona Dea, whose rites he had
violated': the divine justice is the sanction of the human law. Even
in the fear, from which all ultimately sprang, there was a training in
self-repression and self-subordination, which in a more civilised age
must result in a valuable respect and obedience. The descendants of
those who had made religion out of an attempt to appease the hostile
numina, feeling themselves not indeed on more familiar terms with
their 'unknown gods,' but only perhaps a little more confident of
their own strength, were not likely to be wanting in a disciplined
sense of dependence and an appreciation of the value of respect for
authority, which alone can give stability to a constitution. If fear
with the Romans was not the beginning of theological wisdom, it was
yet an important contribution to the character of a disciplined state.
But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the
answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general
understanding of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of
the household. If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where
religion and morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a
clue. There not only are the principal events of life, birth,
adolescence, marriage, attended by their religious sanction, but in
the ordinary course of the daily round the divine presence and the
dependence of man are continually emphasised. The gods are given their
portion of the family meal, the sanctified dead are recalled to take
their share of the family blessings. The result was not merely an
approach—collectively, not individually—to that sense of the
nearness of the unseen, which has so great an effect on the actions of
the living, but a very strong bond of family union which lay at the
root of the life of the state. It would be difficult to find a clearer
expression of the notion than in the fact that the same word pietas,
which expresses the due fulfilment of man's duty to god, is also the
ideal of the relations of the members of a household: filial piety
was, in fact, but another aspect of that rightness of relation, which
reveals itself in the worship of the gods. No doubt that, in the
city-life of later periods, this ideal broke down on both sides:
household worship was neglected and family life became less dutiful.
But it was still, especially in the country, the true backbone of
Roman society, and no one can read the opening odes of Horace's third
book without feeling the strength of Augustus' appeal to it.
And if we translate this, as we have learned to do, into terms of the
state, we can get some idea of what the Romans meant by their debt to
their religion. As the household was bound together by the tie of
common worship, as in the intermediate stage the clan, severed
politically and socially, yet felt itself reunited in the gentile
rites, so too the state was welded into a whole by the regularly
recurring annual festivals and the assurance of the divine sanction on
its undertakings. It might be that in the course of time these rites
lost their meaning and the community no longer by personal presence
expressed its service to the gods, but the cult stood there still, as
the type of Rome's union to the higher powers and a guarantee of their
assistance against all foes: the religion of Rome was, as it has been
said, the sanctification of patriotism—the Roman citizen's highest
moral ideal. It has been remarked, perhaps with partial truth, that
the religion of the Æneid—in many ways a summary of Roman thought
and feeling—is the belief in the fata Romae and their fulfilment.
The very impersonality of this conception makes it a good picture of
what religion was in the Roman state. It was not, as with the Jews, a
strong conviction of the rightness of their own belief and a certainty
that their divine protectors must triumph over those of other nations,
but a feeling of the constant presence of some spirits, who, 'if haply
they might find them,' would, on the payment of their due, bear their
part in the great progress of right and justice and empire on which
Rome must march to her victory. It was the duty of the citizen, with
this conception of his city before his eyes, to see to it that the
state's part in the contract was fulfilled. From his ancestors had
been inherited the tradition, which told him the when, where, and
how, and in the preservation of that tradition and its due performance
consisted at once Rome's duty and her glory. 'If we wish,' says
Cicero, 'to compare ourselves with other nations, we may be found in
other respects equal or even inferior; in religion, that is in the
worship of the gods, we are far superior.' The religion of Rome may
not have advanced the theology or the ethics of the world, but it made
and held together a nation.
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