feeling, even though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be attached.[1] Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this piety. Classical cults are practised, and one may practise as many of them as one pleases, but of these newer, a man belongs to one and one alone. In the old, propaganda is unthinkable; in the new it goes without saying, and the purport of religious exercises tends more and more to the doctrinal side.
From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian and the flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The consequences of the Pseudomorphosis continue, but it is now cults of the West which tend to become a new Church of the East — that is, from the sum of separate cults there evolves a community of those who believe in these gods and their rituals — and so there arises, by processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early Judaic, a Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms of detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma concerning the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now represent each other, and men no longer practise or perform them in the old way, but become "adherents" of them. And the little god of the place becomes — without the gravity of the change being noticed by anyone — the great God really present in the place.
Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its development — the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults, and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern Churches — has been missed.[2] Yet without this key it is quite impossible to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult-deities took the form, east of Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the influence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was never face to face, for the public city-cults had long been inwardly dead and possessed no hold whatever on men's souls. The formidable enemy was Paganism, or Hellenism, emerging as a powerful new Church and born of the selfsame spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman Empire not one cult-Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which, under a thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same divine principle.
- ↑ Contrast with this the exactly opposite process in Jewry before the Pseudomorphosis had begun to affect it, — to wit, the battle against the local "high places" and the concentration of sanctity in Jerusalem. — Tr.
- ↑ With the result that Syncretism is presented as a mere hotchpotch of every conceivable religion. Nothing is further from the truth. The process of taking shape moved first from East to West and then from West to East.
