The Religious Experience of the Roman People | Page 5

on Lord Gifford's foundation, as
one who has made a special study of the religious ideas and practice of
the Roman people. So far as I know, the subject has not been touched
upon as yet by any Gifford lecturer. We are in these days interested in
every form of religion, from the most rudimentary to the most highly
developed; from the ideas of the aborigines of Australia, which have
now become the common property of anthropologists, to the ethical
and spiritual religions of civilised man. Yet it is remarkable how few
students of the history of religion, apart from one or two specialists,
have been able to find anything instructive in the religion of the
Romans--of the Romans, I mean, as distinguished from that vast
collection of races and nationalities which eventually came to be called
by the name of Rome. At the Congress for the History of Religions
held at Oxford in 1908, out of scores of papers read and offered, not
more than one or two even touched on the early religious ideas of the
most practical and powerful people that the world has ever known.
This is due, in part at least, to the fact that just when Roman history
begins to be of absorbing interest, and fairly well substantiated by
evidence, the Roman religion, as religion, has already begun to lose its
vitality, its purity, its efficacy. It has become overlaid with foreign rites
and ideas, and it has also become a religious monopoly of the State; of
which the essential characteristic, as Mommsen has well put it, and as
we shall see later on, was "the conscious retention of the principles of
the popular belief, which were recognised as irrational, for reasons of
outward convenience."[1] It was not unlike the religion of the Jews in
the period immediately before the Captivity, and it was never to profit
by the refining and chastening influence of such lengthy suffering. In
this later condition it has not been attractive to students of religious
history; and to penetrate farther back into the real religious ideas of the
genuine Roman people is a task very far from easy, of which indeed the
difficulties only seem to increase as we become more familiar with it.
It must be remarked, too, that as a consequence of this unattractiveness,
the accounts given in standard works of the general features of this

religion are rather chilling and repellent. More than fifty years ago, in
the first book of his Roman History, Mommsen so treated of it--not
indeed without some reservation,--and in this matter, as in so many
others, his view remained for many years the dominant one. He looked
at this religion, as was natural to him, from the point of view of law; in
religion as such he had no particular interest. If I am not mistaken, it
was for him, except in so far as it is connected with Roman law, the
least interesting part of all his far-reaching Roman studies. More recent
writers of credit and ability have followed his lead, and stress has been
laid on the legal side of religion at Rome; it has been described over
and over again as merely a system of contracts between gods and
worshippers, secured by hard and literal formalism, and without ethical
value or any native principle of growth. Quite recently, for example, so
great an authority as Professor Cumont has written of it thus:--
"Il n'a peut être jamais existé aucune religion aussi froide, aussi
prosaïque que celle des Romains. Subordonnée à la politique, elle
cherche avant tout, par la stricte exécution de pratiques appropriées, à
assurer à l'État la protection des dieux ou à détourner les effets de leur
malveillance. Elle a conclu avec les puissances célestes un contrat
synallagmatique d'où découlent des obligations réciproques: sacrifices
d'une part, faveurs de l'autre.... Sa liturgie rappelle par la minutie de ses
prescriptions l'ancien droit civil. Cette religion se défie des abandons de
l'âme et des élans de la dévotion." And he finishes his description by
quoting a few words of the late M. Jean Réville: "The legalism of the
Pharisees, in spite of the dryness of their ritualistic minutiae, could
make the heart vibrate more than the formalism of the Romans."[2]
Now it is not for me to deny the truth of such statements as this, though
I might be disposed to say that it is rather approximate than complete
truth as here expressed, does not sum up the whole story, and only
holds good for a single epoch of this religious history. But surely, for
anyone interested in the history of religion, a religious system of such
an unusual kind, with characteristics so well marked, must, one would
suppose, be itself an attractive subject. A religion that becomes highly
formalised claims