This paper was written for Dr. John Dow, professor of New Testament at Emmanuel College. It was the second of two essays Frye submitted for New Testament 2, “The Religion and Theology of Paul,” which he took during the 1934–35 academic year. Frye received an “A” for the paper, the typescript of which is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 13.
This paper is chiefly an investigation of the Greek religion known as Orphism, with a note on the similarity of its tenets to those of St. Paul. It does not raise the issue, except by implication, of how far St. Paul could safely be said to have been “influenced” by Orphism. It may be advisable, therefore, to defend this position at the outset, as it apparently shirks what is generally regarded as the most important question in connection with their relationship.
In the first place, there is the obvious point that any examination of “influence” is mainly a groping in the dark. We do not know what influenced Paul, or in what proportions, or at what times, or in what ways he was influenced by other people’s opinions. And nothing short of actually discovering his diary could throw any light on the matter. Even then, the question could not be regarded settled: no thinker is ever perfectly aware of the influences acting upon him. All the writings of Paul we possess are indisputably works of his maturity, when all influences have been melted down in the crucible of his own experience. A personality is not a compound but a complex: it is not a rope of intertwining strands but something infinitely varied, shifting, elusive, and subtle. That Paul was in himself partly Jew, partly Greek, and partly Roman, no one will deny, any more than they will deny that in the course of his ministry he worked with Jews, Greeks, and Romans. But that these three elements in him are all quantitative, that they are solid and discrete entities which scholarship can separate like strata in a rock, is another matter.
When scholars approach Paul as a sort of intellectual Cerberus, with three distinct heads on his shoulders, they are really working with stereotypes, all of them false. We think of the Jew, specifically the Pharisaic Jew, as a legal, almost mercantile, thinker, and whenever we come upon something in Paul that reminds us of the stereotype we call it “Jewish influence.” Similarly, his wide culture suggests the stereotype of the Greek philosopher and is promptly assigned to “Greek influence”; while his talent for organization brings up the image of the Roman consul and is transformed into “Roman influence.” Both Romans and Pharisees were legally minded, and if most Jews were devout monotheists, so were a good many Greeks: there was Jewish culture as humanistic and rational as the Athenian; and Paul’s age was one very like our own, in which the great cities were almost indistinguishable from one another, constituting a pantheon of races and nationalities quite as syncretic as the contemporary religious one. Just as Jerusalem today is a less Jewish city than New York, so the Jewish cities of Paul’s day were as much Rome and Alexandria as Jerusalem, and the nationalism of the Pharisee was, like German and Italian nationalism now, purely a political bluff, without any meaning in culture or in economics. Nineteenth-century Europe hypnotized itself into a belief that nationality and race were real things instead of myths, and nineteenth-century Biblical scholars saw meanings in Paul’s cultural mixture that had probably long ceased to have any meaning for Paul. Protestantism, again, arose with nationalism, the two phenomena always having been closely associated. Consequently, the Protestant prefers to see in Christianity the product of a national consciousness, the growth of which is traced in the Old Testament. This is less true of Calvinists, perhaps, than of nineteenth-century liberals; but just as Jesus becomes the culmination of the Jewish prophetic tradition, so Paul is, in all his thinking, considered to be the logical continuation of the Old Testament tradition. The antithetical position, which sees Paul as essentially a Greek phenomenon, does not escape the same racial and nationalistic preconceptions. Many of the earlier thinkers were rather shocked at the proposition that there could be any extra-Biblical background for Paul. And even some of those who have overcome this prejudice maintain another closely related to it: that even if Paul did live and teach in a world gone completely cosmopolitan, nevertheless he either preserved or ought to have preserved a nationalistic integrity in his teaching, the assumption being, of course, that there is something very bad about a syncretic religion. Professor H.A.A. Kennedy believes that he did preserve it; Professor G.H. Gilbert believes that he ought to have preserved it. The latter says:
When the Jesus of the Gospel was transformed into the Alexandrian Christ, what was achieved was not the gathering of the Gentile world into the Kingdom of Heaven, not an acceptance by that world of the religion of Jesus, but an overthrow of the very basis of that religion. (Greek Thought in the New Testament, 100)1
And the former, by tracing similarities between the mystery cults and the Septuagint, and then asserting the very obvious fact that Christianity was a unique religious product, leaves us with the assumption that Paul could have derived his mystery conception from the Old Testament, and the reflection that if religious developments in Judaea and Greece were so strikingly alike, the differences between them are less important than their similarities.2 The logical outcome of all such disputes is finally that we have on the one hand the conception developing from the researches of Loisy, Reinach, and Reitzenstein,3 which tends in the direction of explaining Paul completely in Greek terms, and on the other hand the reaction from this, which sees him with equal plausibility as entirely Jewish. Surely it is unnecessary to go beyond certain elementary facts. Tarsus was a centre of Greek culture. The people addressed by Paul were many of them converts from mystery religions. Paul talked to them in their own terms; he used the language of initiates, probably not in any very technical sense, but as a courtesy to hearers coming to him from religious traditions, some of which he was bound to respect. The question of Paul’s personal initiation into a mystery cult is purely a matter of guesswork, and is likely to remain so.
Of all the varied and conflicting religions alive in Paul’s time we select Orphism for discussion. It is in many respects the most interesting, as it is perhaps the closest approach of the Western world to a religion as Christians understand the term. With the exception of Judaism, it possessed the only body of theological writing extant before Paul’s first Epistle: it had not been watered down into pure philosophy, like Stoicism or even Neoplatonism, nor had it been entirely absorbed in popular superstition. It was perhaps, with Judaism, the only religion which had succeeded in lifting its doctrines from anthropology into ethics on any extensive scale.
So far from syncretism being a bad thing, it seems to us an indispensable factor in the rise of Christianity. Christianity succeeded, not as a brand new invention, but as a synthesis evoking, in an intelligible form, the real meaning toward which the symbolism in rival faiths was tending. In investigating the “influence” of one of these contemporary religions on St. Paul, we have drawn a complete blank; and in trying to investigate uniformities in their doctrines, we have reached largely negative conclusions. But still we feel that an examination of Orphism from several points of view has some value in isolating a very significant element in the intellectual background of Paul’s time.
The orthodox religion of Greece was Olympian, or, as Nietzsche called it in Birth of Tragedy, Apollonian.4 This religion was one which wavered between polydaemonism and polytheism. Its Bible is largely Homeric epic, and its myths were transmitted by poets. Originally, it seems to have combined a cult of heroes with a general animism which deified every phase of experience. The gods were magnified humans, which meant that they were mostly liars, cowards, bullies, and lechers. Zeus had committed every crime in the calendar; Hermes, the patron of thieves, was not far behind him; Aphrodite was an adulteress of incredible appetite; Poseidon a petulant bureaucrat of the high seas. Yet they were endowed with a strange power, and their worship became largely a matter of rites. Public religion was almost altogether apotropaic and prophylactic.5 Each sacrifice safeguarded the state against some thin-skinned and short-tempered deity: conversely, all disasters were the result of some divine anger or jealousy. Such a religion could not attract the more sensitive minds indefinitely, and Olympian religion and Greek philosophy consistently ignored each other. The majority of the people passed from indifference to open mockery. But a habit confirmed by tradition is hard to break off, and even after all interest in the rites had vanished, there remained the feeling that failure to observe them was dangerous on political if not religious grounds. This feeling lasted all through the early centuries of Christianity: the Christian martyrs were executed for sedition and treason, not for their religious beliefs.
True, Olympian religion did gradually become more refined; its later period abounds in such attractive conceptions as Graces, nymphs, and Muses. But the earlier strata remained. Later on, the conservatives, faced with the challenge of more advanced religions, tried to infuse an ethical and moral spirit into the ancient savage myths by allegorizing them. Plutarch is the most conspicuous example of this process, which lasted until the torrent of ridicule in The City of God swept it away.6 The theocrasia of the Hellenistic world encouraged the belief that the gods of all nations were more or less alike, because all nations formulated their religious experiences in similar ways, and that, consequently, the more important gods represented abstract principles. According to Plutarch, war is evil, and, therefore, cannot be a god: war relates only to humanity in this sense.7 The good qualities engendered in war, courage, cooperation, self-sacrifice, energy, and so on: this is what must be deified. So there becomes a divine war which is the god Ares, and an evil war which is only the result of the folly of mankind. This Platonizing tendency on the part of the timid and vacillating pagans of the era of decadence is largely a shrinking back from the uncompromising ferocity of the Christian zealots, and being so transparently a rationalizing of its own weakness, its ineffectiveness hardly causes much surprise.
The theology of the Olympian cult was as rudimentary as its mythology was complicated. Its ideas of the afterlife advanced very little from the primitive conception of the dead as “shades,” weak and ineffectual like the shadow of a living man. Homeric treatments of this are very similar to such scenes as the King of Babylon in Hell passage in Isaiah [14:4–9]. The gods being so completely amoral, there was little idea of reward or punishment in the future life, other than a few savage stories of divine vengeance which supported the unethical rather than the ethical approach.
This religion was official and aristocratic, imposed on Greece originally by its Dorian conquerors after the Trojan War, and never far away from association with caste and race privilege. Its impact on the populace had been largely in the form of festivals. Pushing up, however, more and more strongly, was a new popular religion, all the more new for being immemorially old.
All primitive peoples who are agricultural and, therefore, dependent on the fertility of the soil for their existence develop a myth which regards the spirit of fertility as a deity necessarily young and vigorous, but either masculine or feminine. This deity, when the former, bears a double relation to the soil which nourishes him, a relation at once that of son to mother and of lover to beloved. As the fertile life of the world disappears every autumn and reappears every spring, the god is conceived as dying in the fall and reviving in the spring. Usually a sacrifice, frequently human, symbolizes his death. An orgiastic drunken frenzy in which sexual excitement reaches its highest pitch is, according to the conceptions of sympathetic magic, which assumes that all phenomena of fertility are interdependent, the appropriate expression of the revival of his potency. Around these two ideas of death and resurrection all the fertility cults revolve. They are usually but by no means invariably associated with the periodic harvest, vintage, sowing, shearing, new and full moon, equinoctial, and solstitial festivals of the ordinary calendar. The dying of the god is bewailed by the women, in the role of earth mother: he is conceived as being slain by emasculation or loss of fertility (the thigh wound of Adonis is a later euphemism), and is often worshipped in the form of some animal which is conceived as having some influence on the crops because of living near them.8
Adonis, the youth beloved of Aphrodite, slain by a boar (which means that he was originally worshipped in the form of a boar), is the most famous of the fertility gods. His cult was originally Syrian, and the red clay brought down by the Adonis river was taken as containing his blood. The Babylonians had their Tammuz, the Phrygians their Attis, beloved of Cybele, the Egyptians their Osiris and his loved one Isis. Most of the purely Greek fertility deities were female (Iphigenia, Kore, Persephone or Proserpine), but they had two important male ones: Hyacinthus of Sparta, and Dionysus of Thrace.9
The fertility cult was widespread among the Canaanites, and came into sharp conflict with the nomadic monolatry of the Hebrews. It undoubtedly permeated the Jahwist cult: its influence is symbolized by a curious piece of irony: the name Jehovah, which is a synthesis of the consonants of Jahweh and the vowels of Adonis. The redaction of the Old Testament records has no doubt erased much evidence to this effect. What remains is slight but significant. Jephthah’s daughter, whose women “bewailed her virginity” [Judges 11:40], was obviously sacrificed in the role of a local Iphigenia or Kore. Joseph’s coat of many colours is an evident vegetation symbol [Genesis 37:3]. After the Exile the monotheist conscience of the Jews began to sharpen. Ezekiel complains of the women weeping for Tammuz in the very gates of Jerusalem [Ezekiel 8:14], and Trito-Isaiah attacks the fertility cults violently.10 But that did not prevent Antiochus Epiphanes from introducing the cult of Dionysus into Judaea,11 and by the time of Christ the Jews, educated and uneducated, were thoroughly well acquainted with the dying and rising god. There was a sect of Jews which worshipped Dionysus under his name of Sabazius (which, like most of that god’s surnames, relates to some kind of intoxicating liquor), confounding it with the Lord God of Sabaoth.12
Of all these fertility cults, that of Dionysus has been most notorious for the ecstatic and orgiastic nature of its rites. It was introduced into Greece from Thrace and had a long struggle for Olympian recognition. Dionysus is not a god in Homer; but he eventually became admitted to the Olympian hierarchy: there are several no doubt aetiological stories recounting his dispute with Apollo. The reasons for his popular acceptance are shrouded in obscurity. Possibly he evoked the remembrance to fertility rites held before the Dorians came; no doubt he brought a revived hope of immortality, and undoubtedly his emblematic wine cup was irresistible. Popular tradition, connecting him with Attis and Adonis, assigned an Asiatic origin to him. He is usually pictured as attended by male followers called satyrs, and women followers called maenads. The latter were, of course, the women who bewailed the death of the god and worked themselves into orgiastic frenzies during his revival. Dionysus was always a god of the vintage rather than the harvest, and the worship of fertility gods was largely in the hands of women. Plutarch has an interesting suggestion to the effect that Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, was an overenthusiastic maenad, and that the well-known strained relationship between her and her husband Philip of Macedon was due to this fact.13 The mother of Dionysus was, of course, the earth mother, Semele (the Slavonic Nova Zembla, “new land,” exemplifies a cognate form). His father was Zeus—that is, after his cult had spread widely enough in Greece to compel his adoption. Essentially a god of intoxication, his fertility origin caused him to be worshipped in the form of trees and various animals, usually a bull, a well-known symbol of fertility.
All music grows out of a synthesis of dance and song, rhythm and melody. In the Middle Ages this double origin of music is clearly marked, the dance being popular and the song (the plainchant) monastic and academic. This affords an instructive parallel to the rise of music and drama in Greece. From the beginning there was the contrast between the Olympian devotional song or paean, associated with Apollo, and the ecstatic dance or dithyramb, which belonged to Dionysus. The latter, probably in its ultimate origin a leaping into the air to promote the growth of crops by sympathetic magic, eventually became a ritual song of the winter solstice festival (the modern Christmas).14 On the dramatic side the τράγoς or goat-song (the word means both goat and a kind of barley, and may refer back to a time when the fertility spirit of the barley crop was considered to be incarnate in a goat) in honour of Dionysus, chanted by his male attendants the satyrs at a goat sacrifice, eventually developed into the satyric drama, and from the satyric drama into the tragedy.15
The purpose of the wild revel of intoxication in the worship of Dionysus was not simply to let off steam or find an excuse for getting drunk. The original sacrifice which accompanied the rite of the dying god was the king of the tribe, in whom the spirit of the god was conceived as incarnate. He was, in other words, the fertility or virility of the tribe. Hence, his sacrifice was consummated as soon as he showed signs of weakening, and his vitality thereby passed to his successor. The king is dead, long live the king;16 there must be no break in between. But the sacrifice was more than a ritual murder: the king was divided among his tribe and eaten. This communion distributed the king’s vitality and it reinforced the solidarity of the tribe. Later on, of course, human sacrifice was commuted to animal sacrifice. The climax of the Dionysiac revel was the tearing apart of some animal as a sacrifice and the dividing of it among the worshippers. A still further development was in the direction of offering the fertility god, the lord of the harvest and the vintage, some of the fruits of his work, and making that offering a communion as well, so that the body is replaced by bread, blood by wine. Some dim idea of this seems to have penetrated the Dionysiac cult: in any case intoxication was enthusiasm, possession by the god. At the moment of ecstasy the communion became complete, and the worshipper became one with his god.
When we say that we see frost forming a design on a window pane, we do not imagine the frost to be conscious of any design, but that it unconsciously goes through a process we can interpret in terms of design. Similarly, the unconsciousness of primitive ritual does not preclude its predictable laws of behaviour, its uniformities where no transmission is possible, its use of an essentially invariable symbolism so that its development takes on what to us is a coherent and logical outline. In the crudest ritual of cannibals there is always a meaning which the trained observer can interpret, just as our dreams are built up involuntarily but quite logically out of the symbols our unconscious works with. Hence, in every phenomenon of anthropology, there is something which can be restated in ethical, philosophical, or even scientific terms. The history of religion records a process of development in which physical and material acts come to be increasingly regarded as mental, spiritual, psychological, symbolic—whatever our vocabulary is accustomed to.
Now in the cult of Dionysus there are certain genuinely religious ideas implicit, which need only a more discerning and conscious mentality to be brought out. Such an access of capacity for abstraction is most likely to be the result of an increased self-consciousness and, therefore, the product of individual reformers. One thinks of the strong individuality of the Hebrew prophets, which infused the old Jahwistic monolatry with ethical and moral ideas and reformed it into a genuine monotheism. One thinks of the arrogant dictatorships established by the Protestant reformers when they wiped out the worship of saints, the veneration of relics, the traditional mythologies absorbed by the earlier Church, and the idea of mechanical efficacy in sacrament. And the relation of the Hebrew prophets to the old priesthood, of the Protestant reformers to the Catholic Church, is, mutatis mutandis, the relation of Orphism to the traditional Olympian religion of Greece.
The cult of Dionysus, we have said, was absorbed, after a considerable struggle, into the official religion of Greece. Delphi became a seat of worship for Dionysus as well as Apollo. But the maturing Hellenic civilization could not tolerate indefinitely the frantic orgies of the Bacchic ritual, its intoxication and sexual license. The extraordinary grip such a ritual held on the imagination is preserved for us in the Bacchae of Euripides. A reform, however, in the interests of refinement was inevitable, and about the name of Orpheus that reform centres. Orphism is, like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, a religion with a personal founder. It was never a national religion: it was esoteric rather than communal, and its ritual was one of secret and private initiation rather than public festival or sacrifice. It is a sophisticated religion depending on theology rather than myth, doctrinal and revealed rather than spontaneous and symbolic, working from sacred texts rather than from a traditional observance. In other words, it has all the characteristics of organized religion, and is, we have seen, the first such religion to appear in Europe.
Orpheus himself is a figure somewhat like Jesus in many respects. That there was a historical Orpheus seems almost beyond dispute. The Greeks reverenced him as a hero, with supernatural attributes, but never as an actual god. The most common story of his death is that he was torn to pieces by Thracian women maddened by the intoxication of the Dionysiac revels, which may well point to a real martyrdom. As the tearing of an animal was, we have seen, part of that ritual, it appears that Orpheus, like Jesus, was martyred in the role of sacrificial victim or Lamb of God. Again, like Jesus, he is associated with sweetness and gentleness. There is no trace whatever of the war-god about him. He is represented as a magical musician of irresistible power, charming even the inanimate world with his lyre, just as Jesus is the teacher whose healing personality draws all men to him. Orpheus evaded the sirens by outdoing them at their own art of singing, just as Jesus overcame the temptations of the devil by turning his arguments back on him. The famous story of his love for Eurydice (the original version was a long way from a love story), his visit to Hades to reclaim her, and the tragic failure of his mission, has no direct parallel with Jesus, but surely Jesus’ descent from heaven to the world to reclaim the world and his rejection by a recalcitrant humanity is suggested by it, and in Orpheus’ descent into Hades and his rescuing of Eurydice we have a genuine katabasis and, perhaps, an early form of a harrowing of hell. These parallels are suggested to show that the Orphic religion followed a really Christlike founder, and that Paul may very well have come in contact with Orphics as devout and pious as any Christian could wish to be. Besides, the earliest Christian art, particularly that of the catacomb period, represents Orpheus in place of Jesus, and the transition from the master musician to the Good Shepherd is an almost insensible one. At the same time, the essentially magical attributes of Orpheus made him a shaman as well as a reformer. We cannot afford to overlook the degenerate and superstitious side of Orphism in our admiration for it, any more than we can ignore that side of Christianity. In Euripides’ play of the Cyclops a lazy and cowardly sailor proposes to use a charm of Orpheus to compel Ulysses’ flaming torch to propel itself into the eye of Polyphemus.17
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is built around a thesis developed from Plutarch, and may well go back from there to the very heart of Orphic theology itself. In Greek culture, says Nietzsche, there are two opposed outlooks, the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. The former is the conservative, orthodox element. It is civilized and intellectual and corresponds to the Greek love of unity in all things, moderation in conduct, proportion in art, strict bounds and reasonable limits to everything. The latter is incorrigibly primitive and subconscious; it delights in breaking out of restrictions, it exults in life and energy for their own sakes, it is anarchic and disruptive of all forms of stability. Where the Apollonian tendency is toward unity, toward the typical, the catalogued and classified, the Dionysiac accepts the variety of the actual world and explodes the idea of unity. Dionysus, the fertility god, wears a coat of many colours; he is life in a million forms: he is the driving, plunging rhythm of activity. The assimilation of these religions to one another had, therefore, brought about a tension which it was the business of more reflective and philosophical minds to solve. The religious consciousness moves from polytheism to monotheism, because it is trying to get away from the transient and shifting to the stable and permanent. Consequently, it has to deal with the paradox of the one and the many: why so much complexity in experience, if God is one?
A partial resolution of this tension, of course, is afforded by the symbol of communion. Here the united god is dismembered and divided among his worshippers, whereupon a new integration takes place: he reunites and the worshippers become one with him. But another factor is suggested by the nature of the fertility god. It should not be forgotten that the quarrel between the two religions of Greece is a quarrel between Dionysus and Apollo. Apollo stands out as the representative of Olympian religion, which is called Apollonian after him. He is the master musician who resents Orpheus’ rivalry and cannot tolerate his singing head which, tradition says, was preserved at Lesbos after his martyrdom. There are vases depicting Apollo scowling at the head (which gave further offence by uttering oracles like those of Apollo himself at Delphi) and saying: “Leave that which belongs to me.” If they later became friends they must have had something in common.18 Apollo was originally a sun-god, and Dionysus was a fertility god. Orpheus, the reformer of the Dionysiac cult, was himself not strictly a god, but his descent into the underworld in search of Eurydice is evidently a fertility myth, Eurydice probably representing the earth mother. Now both the sun and vegetation are transient, but they recur: and that fact of recurrence brings in an element of permanence and a feeling of stability. So the paradox is overcome by observation: the sun dies every day, but is deathless; vegetation dies every year, but every year revives. Communion and the idea of a dying and reviving god are inseparably part of the symbolism which works out this tension of one and many. The sun-god and the fertility-god blend into the abstract idea of recurrence.
The archetypal myth of Orphism presents this problem in symbolic terms. Zagreus (Dionysus in a chthonic form) is as an infant torn to pieces by the Titans or giants; his heart is miraculously preserved, and by means of it he comes to life again in the form of a new Dionysus. There are dozens of variants of the story: sometimes the heart is placed in a gypsum statue and reanimates it; sometimes Zeus swallows the heart; sometimes the god is conceived as having been dismembered in the form of a bull or goat, which probably means that an original child sacrifice later became an animal sacrifice. What is essential is the combination of two ideas: the dividing of the god and his resurrection. It is this that constitutes the fundamental theogony of Orphism.
The idea of recurrence was extended by the Orphics to human life. Most of the Orphics accepted some form of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and in Plato’s conception of anamnesis, the identification of knowledge with recollection, we have the Orphic tendency to think of things in terms of recurrence. But the idea of recurrence, by itself, can lead only to a pessimistic and despairing fatalism. From being a conservative idea, an assurance of stability, it soon becomes a monotonous turning of a wheel, and to this wheel all living things are bound. The theological interest of Orphism was largely directed to the problem of how to escape from this wheel. In Plato’s myth in the Republic the universe turns on a spindle held on the knees of Necessity [bk. 10, 6i6d]. In its essentials Orphism is very like Brahmanism: everything is bound to fate, karma, for ever and ever, unless some remedy be found.
Plainly the next step is to regard some form of recurrence as a potentially moral experience. Thus, Orphism develops the idea of reward and punishment in the afterlife. This we shall consider in a moment. But for this to be completely achieved it is necessary to discover some symbol of death and resurrection in life itself. So the dying and reviving sun, the dying and reviving vegetation, come to impose a pattern on human experience. Gradually there develops the idea of moral progression in physical recurrence. The descent into the world of darkness and death, and the re-emergence into life, which both sun and vegetation undergo: does not this correspond to the struggle of humanity, which is bound by all the fetters of sin and flesh, to gain a new strength and vitality? There is probably more of the spirit of Orphism than is generally recognized in Plato’s profound allegory of the cave [Republic, bk. 7, 514a-520e]. So Orphism develops a technique of palingenesis, or new birth, as an essential element in its religion.
We are not concerned here so much with the Orphic ritual (assuming that there was a ritual uniquely Orphic) as with the moral aspect of its religion. A religion depending essentially on new birth, on purification, is bound to work with some idea of dualism implicit: the starting point and the goal of the worshipper’s progress must be opposed. Let us glance back at the myth. The infant Zagreus, we saw, was torn to pieces by the Titans. The Titans, then, must be evil spirits, and as such they were, according to the myth, slain by Zeus with his thunderbolts. But the evil they personified lives on. Man’s nature inherits, as a result of the original murder of Zagreus, an evil and a good side. The titanic, savage element represents the evil side; the Dionysiac the good side. It is the duty of Orphic worshippers to purge themselves of the original sin of the Titans by imitating Dionysus in his death and new birth. This kind of dualism is certain to draw a sharp distinction between flesh and spirit, body and soul. Orphic thought was dominated throughout by the idea of the sinfulness of the flesh. The soul (of course, the soul and body were distinct entities for the Orphics) was imprisoned in the body, and was struggling to be set free. Plato says in the Cratylus:
I think this (i.e., the word 
), admits of many explanations, if a little, even very little, change is made; for some say it is the tomb (
) of the soul. … I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave it this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison.19
Along with the idea of palingenesis grew the idea of catharsis, the cathartic experience being the deliverance, however temporary, of the soul from the body. All the practices usually associated with this were encouraged by the Orphics: asceticism of all kinds, Orpheus himself having been a good deal of a misogynist; vegetarianism, the eating of meat being an absorption of more flesh, and in a reincarnation theology amounting to cannibalism in any case; abstinence from alcoholic beverages (we are getting further and further away from Dionysus); and cremation, or the annihilation of the earthly body at death. This sounds like a repudiation rather than a reformation of the Dionysiac cult, but it was designed for the same end, communion with the god, although it revolted against the materialistic practices of the earlier sect and replaced them with spiritual ones. For physical intoxication the Orphics substituted mystical ecstasy and the hallucinations resulting from the self-tortures of the ascetic; for the physical absorption of the god’s body, a spiritual union. In doing this they eliminated an important element in the Dionysiac religion, and brought about their own eventual destruction. The Dionysiac religion spread over Greece with something of a missionary fervour, because it was itself genuinely catholic and communal: its orgies, crude and even repulsive as they seem to us now, were at any rate social gatherings; the feast united the worshippers. The Orphics, in spiritualizing this process, made it individual and, consequently, esoteric. Its unit was the brotherhood, the small group or thiasos. Like all religions depending on secret initiation, Orphism was never very far from intellectual snobbery.
This last trait is amply revealed in the Orphic doctrine of election. The development of the concept of original sin reached almost the point of Samuel Butler’s caricature of it in Erewhon with the Orphics.20 The soul is indestructible and immortal, the body transient and corrupt. The pure soul is a god: by purifying our soul we unite with the gods. All living men are souls who have been compelled for some fault to become united to a body. Hence, the body is the prison of the soul in a very literal sense: all our souls are convicts. At the end of ten thousand years or thereabouts the soul has served its term, in various forms, and then returns to the other world, awaiting its final judgment. According to Plato the only people who get their sentences shortened for good behaviour are virtuous philosophers and homosexual school teachers. He says in the Phaedrus:
The soul must be a thing both uncreate and immortal. … All that is soul presides over all that is without soul, and patrols all heaven.… When it is perfect and fully feathered it roams in upper air, and regulates the entire universe; but the soul that has lost its feathers is carried down … and when it has settled there … the name of animal is given to the whole, to this compound, I mean, of soul and body, with the addition of the epithet mortal. … [246a–c]
Those who have lived justly receive afterwards a better lot, those who have lived unjustly, a worse. For to that same place from which each soul set out, it does not return for ten thousand years … unless it has belonged to a guileless lover of philosophy, or a philosophic lover of boys. [248e–249a; trans. J. Wright]
These get away with about three thousand years.
Dionysus had conquered Greece partly because he brought the irresistible hope of immortality: through communion with an immortal god one partakes of his immortal nature. Orphism preserved this concept and worked out an elaborate eschatology. In its crudest form the eventual release from the karma of material life was, of course, simply the Mohammedan houri-paradise for the good, eternal torture for the bad. As to the latter, their punishments in the main reflected the same pattern of recurrence. Sisyphus, who rolls a stone eternally uphill and has it come rattling and bumping back down again—
21—is a typical figure. Tantalus is another favourite denizen of Hades, and the Danaides, whose story recalls Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish virgins—the connecting link being Plato’s comparison in the Gorgias of the foolish soul to a leaky jar [493b]—also appear on the Orphic vases and paintings, the most famous of which is the great underworld scene of Polygnotus described by Pausanias.22 This materialistic conception of the afterlife has been well caricatured by Plato in the Republic:
Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son vouchsafe to the just; they take them down into the world below, where they have the saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk, crowned with garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of drunkenness is the highest meed of virtue. … But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve. [bk. 2, 363c–d; trans. Benjamin Jowett]
Gradually, of course, the idea eventually consolidated that only those initiated into Orphism would be saved. All others, not having gone through any palingenesis or catharsis, were necessarily impure according to the doctrine of original sin, and the stock phrase to describe them was “lying in the mire,” to which Plato refers [363d]. One of the most striking relics of Orphism are the little gold leaf inscriptions of what the soul is to see in the underworld, and what he is to say to the spirits who approach him.
Some authorities prefer a Cretan origin for Orpheus, others a Mycenean: there seems something exotic about him in Greece. It would be interesting to know if he were part of the vast spiritual and intellectual revolution in western Asia which brought about the monotheism evident in the great progression of Hebrew prophets, in Zoroaster, in the Babylonian worship of Marduk and Nebuchadnezzar’s passionate adoration of him, in the Behistun inscription of Darius.23 Christianity and its contemporary rivals resulted from the aging of the great classical civilization: they arose in its last phase, the phase of imperialism, of great cities, of a disaffected proletariat, of a dried-up agrarian economy, of decadent, sophisticated culture. In such times the proletariat forms a church, or new religious consciousness, and consolidates a cultural tradition which survives the shock of nomadic invasion and destruction.24 This process is going on today; it went on two thousand years ago, when Christianity became the religious faith of the proletariat of the classical world and conquered the barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire. Is there not a possibility that the growth of early Asiatic culture, which reached its late imperialistic stage in the time of Zoroaster and Amos, produced a parallel phenomenon, and that Deutero-Isaiah bears to Cyrus a relation somewhat like that of the Christian Pope Leo the Great to the Christian Alaric?25 There is the same proletarian consciousness in the Hebrew prophets, the same internationalism, the same dream of eventual peace, the same hatred of the rich and exaltation of the poor, the same acute sense of economic realities, that we find in apostolic Christianity. Is Orpheus part of this consciousness?
This, of course, is pure guesswork: we cannot be sure whether Orpheus is earlier or later than Homer. The famous Orphic poetry, of which Orpheus himself, with his disciples Musaeus and Linus, were said to be the greatest composers, has not survived, beyond a few lines quoted by Plato and others, and a number of pseudonymous works. In the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ there seems to have grown up an extensive sacred Orphic literature, now also lost. But whatever Orpheus’ own origin, Orphism became at once a big-city religion, like early Christianity. It centred in Athens and in the great cities of south Italy, notably Kroton, famous for destroying the notorious Sybaris,26 perhaps in a fit of Orphic prudery. At Athens Orphism probably absorbed a good deal of the official agrarian mysteries of Eleusis. In the fifth century B.C. the tyrant Pisistratus at Athens favoured Orphism and set an Orphic called Onomacritus to edit the Orphic texts, which he seems to have done rather unscrupulously. At the same time the poems of Homer were edited. There would naturally be a sharp opposition between the Orphics and the poems that formulated the religion they were attacking, of the sort reflected so uncompromisingly in Plato’s Republic. That they made interpolations into the sacred Homeric text seems certain. The most plausible suggestion in this connection is that the great underworld scene in Odyssey XI is Orphic, as it points to a conception of the afterlife unknown to the Homeric Odysseus. The original was apparently somewhat like the Witch of Endor scene in the Old Testament [1 Samuel 28:7]: Odysseus seeks advice from the shade of Tiresias, and calls him up. This is expanded into the great canvas which includes Sisyphus, Tantalus, and the other stock criminals of Hades. In general, it may be said that the great contribution to art made by the Orphics was the art form of the katabasis, or descent to the underworld. This theme, which in painting develops into the danse macabre in the Middle Ages, is developed from Odyssey XI by Virgil in the great sixth book of the Aeneid, and from him by Dante. Probably Shakespeare’s Tempest belongs to the same tradition.27 The Old Testament, no doubt as a result of Hellenistic as well as Mesopotamian influence, has one genuine katabasis, the King of Babylon in Hell [Isaiah 14:4–9], and there are a number of other symbols of initiation and the descent of the soul. The three children go through the purgatory of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, and emerge unscathed. Daniel descends into the lion’s den, but comes out miraculously preserved. In Jonah’s descent into the fish’s belly the moral and purgatorial nature of the experience is more clearly marked. Yet all three experiences are genuine initiations.
As Orphism grew and spread over Greece, it developed, like all religions, in two directions, up and down. Downward, it absorbed all the mechanical ritual formulae of the earlier nature cults, and the initiatory rites became a solemnly ridiculous hocus-pocus to anyone with a well-developed sense of humour. Orphism was an individualistic religion, and thereby in danger of priggishness; to its relation to the established Eleusinian cult that of Puritan and Anglican may perhaps offer a rough analogy. Aristophanes’ play The Clouds has a long scene which is nothing short of an intricate and detailed parody of the Orphic rites.28 His attitude may be compared to Ben Jonson’s attitude to the Puritans in Bartholomew Fair.29 On the other hand, an involved theology sprang up from the Zagreus myth, and without this theology much of the development of Greek philosophy from Thales to Plato is as unintelligible as the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to Leibnitz would be without some knowledge of the doctrines of the Catholic Church.
The theology that developed from the Zagreus myth added little to the essential symbolic structure of Orphism. Cosmological and theogonic guesswork, the main material of pre-Socratic thinkers, worked its way in. In Orphism the most influential documents were the Theogony of Hesiod and a Rhapsodic Theogony30 ascribed to Orpheus himself. The central doctrine of this is, of course, the problem of the existence of variety and the demand of metaphysical and theological thinking for unity. We have considered this intellectual situation in some detail. The epigram assigned to Musaeus, Orpheus’ disciple, sums it up: 
, 
.31
The theogony resulting from this follows a stock pattern. Creation started as a result of the dividing and discriminating of objects from an original unity. In the beginning was time (Chronos) or duration. Out of time appears a cosmic principle (the aether) and a chaotic one (Chaos or Erebus). The collision of time and the cosmos results in the creation of an egg, symbol of potential and created life. From the egg is hatched the first-born of the gods, Phanes, the source of life as associated with light and energy, who is also Dionysus and Eros. He has a daughter-wife Night, who bears to him Earth and Heaven (Ge and Uranus). Apparently there are two strains of the myth, one beginning with night and the other with light, just as there is a water-chaos and a drought-chaos version of the story of creation in the Genesis cosmogony.
Then comes the race of giant gods and the well-known myths about Cronus, his swallowing of his children and the miraculous preservation of Zeus, and the eventual supremacy of Zeus. Zeus becomes the creator and unifying principle of the world by swallowing Phanes. (This extraordinary myth perhaps relates to a historical quarrel in which the Orphics were unwillingly compelled, out of deference to popular feeling, to accept their arch enemy Zeus as the creator-god. In any case, it was no doubt useful to have in the sacred text the example of a god who could swallow everything.) Zeus in turn has a daughter-wife, the earth goddess Kore-Persephone, who bears to him Dionysus-Zagreus. This latter becomes a third universal god, Zeus abdicating in his favour. Then follows the myth of the rending of Zagreus by the Titans, already considered. Zagreus is the reborn Phanes: his relation to Zeus is very similar in many ways to the Christian relationship of divine Father and Son. As we have seen, he is redeemer as well as god, the opponent of the evil or titanic element in man and champion of humanity.
In this complicated myth one discerns certain recognizable traits. Simplified somewhat, it is not greatly unlike the Christian doctrine of Incarnation, at least in its later stages. The involved and exceedingly incestuous genealogy reflects the logical difficulty of getting a plausible line of descent from elemental ideas of order, chaos, and creation to the world of man and nature; from the perfect to the imperfect, from the infinite to the finite. The same thing no doubt is responsible for the endless lists of eons and emanations in Gnosticism. There is the repetition of the theme of death—usually through being eaten—and rebirth, of division and reunification of all things. According to Guthrie the original element in this theogony is the notion of a creator-god.32 In the story of the infant Zagreus, lured away from his guardians by the Titans with gifts of toys and playthings, we have a genuine cult of a divine child. Eros (love) is here attraction, in both the ordinary-sense relation to sexual love, and in the physicist’s sense of the gathering together of matter. Cohesion is the stability of the world of space; procreation and reproduction, the stability of the world of time: both depend on “love.” This is the basic principle of the philosophy of Empedocles, and its significance for future Christian thought needs no comment. Further implications of the doctrine are worked out in the Symposium, where beauty is interpreted as the attempt to make love permanent. Later theologians added various abstractions as deities, such as Ananke (necessity), whom Er saw in the Republic [bk. 10, 616c], Dike (justice), and Adikia (injustice). There is an amusing vase on which a rather shrewish-looking Dike is depicted as vigorously beating an ugly and speckled Adikia with an implement that looks somewhat like a crowbar.33
The philosophical developments of Orphism are still largely a matter of dispute. On the whole, the religion seemed to attract speculation by the pungency and vividness of its imagery and symbolic language, but remained confined throughout its history to small groups: one is again reminded of Puritanism in England. Apparently the Pythagorean cult of southern Italy was to some extent a development of it: it worshipped Apollo, but followed the Orphic way of life, though it replaced the mythical theogony with a quasi-mathematical and occult one. The cosmological guesses of the Ionians, particularly Anaximander, remind us of the Orphic myths in their general outlines, but there is little need to attach too much significance to that fact. That two a priori speculators working on insufficient data arrive at similarly shaped conclusions is probably about as significant as the fact that they would both describe approximately perfect circles if they were lost in the woods. It seems fairly certain that Heraclitus and Empedocles were Orphics.34 But, of course, the real philosophical spokesman of Orphism is Plato. Sharply critical of its vulgarities, devoutly appreciative of its purer qualities, Plato is as undoubtedly an Orphic as Leibnitz or Pascal were undoubtedly Christians. Most of Plato’s more important dialogues contain myths giving what are apparently authoritative statements of Orphic doctrines. The Republic, the Phaedo, and the Gorgias end with magnificent myths of Orphic eschatology and visions of the afterlife; the Phaedrus deals with the myth of transmigration; the Timaeus, with the myth of creation. An Orphic dogma is frequently as valid for Plato in refuting arguments as Socrates’ dialectic. Plato had the artist’s mind: no other philosopher has ever had a tenth of his influence on creative artists of all kinds, despite the hostility and Philistinism he displays toward them in the Republic [bk. 10, 595–607] and the Laws [bk. 7, 817]. He realized that the highest knowledge is intuitive rather than intellectual, or, more exactly, that there are two kinds of intellectual perception, understanding and intelligence. The former is the passive recipient and organizer of information: the latter the actively synthesizing mind, which perceives relationships hidden to others and infers a complete pattern from small data: the mind which comprehends the outline of a body from seeing a fossilized knuckle-bone. Such a mind is essentially a symbolic mind: it is continually selecting outward experiences significant for inward ones. So the myth in Plato does duty for the presentation of this ultimate, symbolic form of truth.
The appeal of Orphism was peculiarly Platonic in its philosophical implications. It dealt with the world in terms of an antithesis: evil was positive and actual; good, ideal and potential. Logically, therefore, it was a religion depending on the rejection of the world. It tended to see the world as Heraclitus saw it, a seething mass of dissolving unrealities, without stability, order, or recognizable purpose behind it. The real, the permanent, to the Orphic lay elsewhere. If the world was to be rejected and the flesh cast off and despised, only the mind could arrive at truth, so that truth and reality were purely mental phenomena. This does not mean that they are purely subjective: what is subjective about us is only the bodily, sensible part of us. Our prisoned souls, which alone can apprehend truth, know it really and objectively. This is at once Platonic philosophy and Orphic theology, and it is evident that Plato was peculiarly fitted to be the interpreter of Orphism. To the inductive, empiric mind of Aristotle, who identified myth with art, art with fiction, and distinguished them all from facts, Orphism made no appeal. He saw no sharp dualism of soul and body: to him the soul was the form of the body. He saw no sharp cleavage, therefore, between truth of the soul, which was formal and ideal, and truth of the body, which according to Plato was relative and uncertain. His great authority may be said to have destroyed the prestige of Orphism as an intellectualized, theological religion.
By Paul’s time Orphism becomes as elusive as Proteus. It formed, necessarily, the religious basis of Neoplatonism, but the fertile minds of the Neoplatonic commentators read what they liked into the Orphic tradition. The three centuries between Paul and Alexander the Great had seen the Greek and Oriental world come into contact and produce the Graeco-Asiatic mixture we call the Hellenistic civilization. An enormous number of identifications of gods took place. The Hellenic Olympian worship, like the Baal worship of the Phoenicians, was thoroughly localized: it tended to assume that the gods worshipped in any locality were powerful in and for that locality. This developed into a bureaucratic conception of divinity, and many of the better-educated Romans paid homage to whatever deities they considered most powerful, often including Jehovah and Christ in their worship. At the same time, the striking similarities of different pantheons soon led to rapid assimilation. The wholesale identification of Greek and Roman gods is familiar to everyone. The fertility gods, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, soon blended: Adonis gradually extended his sway over Greece, Attis over Rome.
Orphism had always had something syncretic about it: it was never thoroughly assimilated to Greece, and the similarities between it and Hinduism almost preclude the possibility of entirely independent development. In Palestine the Essenes were perhaps the leading exponents of Orphic and semi-Orphic views.
In Paul’s time mystery religions were everywhere, but it is probably safer to lay emphasis on Paul’s differences from them rather than his connections with them. Paul never accepted any doctrine of the mechanical or magical efficacy of rites, and Messrs. Kennedy and Anderson Scott have fairly well exploded the theory that his use of initiate terminology was really technical.35 But most of these and other doctrines of the mystery religions were as much bad Orphism as they would have been bad Paulinism. Orphism had accompanied the great cultural achievements of Greece: its great moment had come with Plato. Aristotle had destroyed it intellectually, and Aristotle’s contemporary Alexander the Great had started a theocrasia which had long before Paul’s time inundated its finer elements. Its esoteric character had disappeared: its rites were casually mentioned and discussed rather than vaguely hinted at, as in Plato and even in the dramatists contemporary with him. The philosophers of the day were on the whole, even the Neoplatonists, closer to the philosophy of Stoicism than the religion of Orphism. The Orphic way of life, whatever popular appeal it still had, was not the religion of the “best people” in Paul’s time. At first sight it might seem that to talk of any connection of Paul with Orphism would be like talking of the influence of Franciscan nominalism on a contemporary evangelist: that whatever connections we might find we could put down to pure coincidence. To a large extent this is undoubtedly true. One of the most important questions in connection with Paul’s affiliations with the mystery religions is that of his view of sacrament, more particularly of the communal meal; and it is highly probable that the Orphics gave this up: their prohibitions against meat-eating and wine-drinking strike at it in its two possible forms of sacrifice and sacrament. The extent to which Orphism retained its hold on the people after it had lost its hold on the philosophers is a matter of hypothesis, not certainty. The point has been made that allusions to Orphic rites in Aristophanes and his successors would depend on a widespread popular knowledge of them.36 Religion is inherently conservative, and the Greeks were the most conservative of peoples. Some transmission of tradition from the Orphic devout contemporary with Plato to the cultural milieu of Paul is a long way from impossibility.
Let us review, as briefly as possible, the obvious comparisons and contrasts between Orphism and Christianity as a whole. Both religions centred around the ideas of new birth, regeneration, conversion. Both regarded religion as essentially a way of life. And while the founder and the god of Orphism were not united into one figure, as with Christianity, still the story of the martyred infant Zagreus undoubtedly does illustrate the fact, if it illustrates nothing more, that the symbolism of the story of Christ went home to all men, for all nations had been struggling to formulate something like it in their own religions from the earliest times.
The purpose of conversion in each religion was deliverance from evil. In Orphism there was no clear idea of sin, because their moral ideas had not yet become separated from magical ones and because there was in Orphism no definitely personal god. Purification for the Orphic always had something hygienic, something purely physical, about it. Between the moral sin of injustice and the breaking of a magical taboo of vegetarianism they made no distinction. Of course, this distinction should not be pressed too far, as Christianity probably escaped very little further, in practice whatever its theory was, from the same thing. And broadly speaking, both religions accepted, from their own points of view and interpretations of the concepts, the doctrine of original sin and the feeling that ordinary experience provided a dissatisfaction religious experience could overcome.
We have mentioned the connections between Orpheus and Jesus and the fact that a link between the religions was preserved by the Christians themselves, who in their paintings passed from the delineation of Orpheus the musician to Jesus the Good Shepherd. David in most cases serves as the link. Frequently Orpheus is represented as crucified, and there was a tradition of the crucifixion of Orpheus. And, of course, there is a large element of the dying fertility god symbolism about Jesus (cf. John 12:24), and the Orphic’s theology was definitely in the direction of making out of Dionysus and Zeus a son-god and a father-god, just as their idea of communion with the god after initiation tended toward monotheism. In eschatology, no doubt, there was more assimilation. The Christians, of course, dispensed with all the paraphernalia of reincarnation, transmigration of souls, the wheel of birth, the ten-thousand-year gaol sentence, and the rest of it. But probably the Orphic idea that there was some intermediate stage between the earthly life and final bliss, some underworld place of judgment, eventually developed, with some help from Virgil, into the Christian purgatory. On the other hand, the Christians believed in bodily resurrection, while the Orphics cremated the body.
These resemblances are too striking to be overlooked: the development of Christology in Greece from Paul to the Nicene Council did not grow out of the air; there must have been a strong theological tradition already present which the dogmas of Christianity summed up. The idea of separating the creative and redemptive principles in the Godhead is surely one peculiar to Greece rather than Judaea: the Jewish tradition postulated more of a gap between human and divine natures. Of course, the early Church Fathers, notably Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, explained these resemblances by falling back on the stock argument that the devil had invented false religions as parodies of the true, so as to confuse the faithful.37
But certainly both Orphism and Paulinism have a very similar scaffolding, however different the completed buildings are. The emphasis of both is overwhelmingly eschatological, and they both stress the significance of the ecstatic state. The ecstatic experience of the Orphic initiate is largely magical and, thereby, is far cruder than Paul’s; but in both cases the ecstasy is involuntary, something ultimately not related to the human will. For both Paul and the Orphics this points to the unsatisfactory nature of life in the unecstatic state. Both assigned the origin of this to a strain of evil (Paul and the Orphics had, of course, as already explained, very different ideas about evil) inherent in man. The Orphics called this titanic; Paul connected it with Adam. This original sin was in both religions inescapable for the uninitiated. For the Orphics man is bound to an endless wheel of existence: for Paul he lives under the curse of the Law. The penalty of the unregenerate life is in each case associated with fatalism. For the Orphics all living beings are convicted souls: for Paul all of us are judged by the wrath of God. Both connected the antithesis between the life of sin and the life of regeneration with a further antithesis of flesh and spirit. For both, the highest life was ascetic and contemptuous of the body. Both worshipped a sacrificed and reborn god, and both believed that imitation of the god’s death and resurrection was connected with conversion. Both tended to feel that the reborn god at the centre of the religion was not the whole of the God-head: that his work was to save rather than to judge, and that the best image to describe his relation to the creator-god was that of son and father. Paul, of course, and the Orphics probably, accepted the historical reality of the reborn god: the grave of Dionysus was pointed out at Delphi. Both were in any case convinced of his ubiquity and his power to unite all his worshippers in their communion with him. The Pauline church and the Orphic thiasos were both brotherhoods. Both spoke of the religious experience as conversion to a new life: both found in this a regeneration and an escape from the horror of ordinary life. Both believed (cf. Plato in the Republic) [bk. 10, 6i4e-6i6a] that the sufferings endured by the faithful were of no account beside the rewards of the afterlife. Both were conservative in politics, but uncompromising to the last degree in religion. Both were essentially missionary faiths, working by the founding of brotherhoods rather than by emotional mass appeals.
None of this, of course, touches the climacteric aspect of Paul’s teaching. The important things about Paul are things which cannot possibly be wedged into Orphism. Had Paul been just one more Orphic, he would have been, by that time at least, a nonentity. The moral emphasis of Paul, his complete lack of any reliance on mechanical rites, save as a memorial or symbol, his ethical challenge that what was free to one was free to all, shattered the exclusive, selfish, esoteric priggishness of Orphism and thereby destroyed its whole structure. Again, his historical consciousness, his sense of the actuality and the recency of Jesus’ life and his sense of the imminence of world catastrophe, gave his message a concrete reference and an urgency the speculations of the Greek sect lacked. He thrust in front of his hearers the time-world they were living in, the world that the Orphics turned away from. Without this, Paul would have been ineffective, just as Orphism was. We can set down his moral and historical senses to his “Jewish influence,” if we like; certainly he would never have had them had he not been a Jew. But he was not a mere crossing of Jew and Greek: he was a Christian, something qualitatively different from either, and an individual genius of the type occasionally permitted to appear and change the shape of human history.
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