The Ethical Value of Oriental Religions under the Roman Empire

Extract

To estimate with any considerable degree of accuracy the moral value of the Oriental religions under the Roman Empire is a hard and perhaps an impossible task. The difficulties arise in part from the fact that these religions, like most others, did not aim primarily at developing what we understand by morality in the individual, but rather at establishing such relations with the gods as to give men security and prosperity here and hereafter; and in part the difficulties are due to the paucity of our data and our liability to error in the interpretation thereof. Yet a religion, like any other form of human expression, inevitably influences as well as reflects the conduct of the social group which cultivates it; that is to say, it cannot exist apart by itself. Therefore it is not an unprofitable thing to attempt to determine with such accuracy as may be attainable the relation to morality of the imported Oriental cults which were widely cultivated in the Occidental part of the Roman Empire between the first and the fourth centuries of our era. We confine our consideration to the Western half of the Empire, for there the evidence as to these exotic religions is most plentiful and it is possible to see them isolated, so to speak, from their native environment. It will be necessary, however, first to consider the moral and religious environment into which these cults entered.