on
toward a barbarous past, as a relapse to the level of primitive animism? If
so, we should be deceived by appearances. Religions do not fall back into
infancy as they grow old. The pagans of the fourth century no longer
naively considered their gods as capricious genii, as the disordered powers
of a confused natural philosophy; they conceived them as cosmic energies
whose providential action was regulated in a harmonious system. Faith was
no longer instinctive and impulsive, for erudition and reflection had
reconstructed the entire theology. In a certain sense it might be said that
theology had passed from the fictitious to the metaphysical state,
according to the formula of Comte. It was intimately connected with the
knowledge of the day, which was cherished by its last votaries with love
and pride, as faithful heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Orient and
Greece.[17] In many instances it was nothing but a religious form of the
cosmology of the {207} period. This constituted both its strength and its
weakness. The rigorous principles of astrology determined its conception of
heaven and earth.

The universe was an organism animated by a God, unique, eternal and
almighty. Sometimes this God was identified with the destiny that ruled all
things, with infinite time that regulated all visible phenomena, and he was
worshiped in each subdivision of that endless duration, especially in the
months and the seasons.[18] Sometimes, however, he was compared with a
king; he was thought of as a sovereign governing an empire, and the various
gods then were the princes and dignitaries interceding with the rulers on
behalf of his subjects whom they led in some manner into his presence. This
heavenly court had its messengers or "angels" conveying to men the will of
the master and reporting again the vows and petitions of his subjects. It
was an aristocratic monarchy in heaven as on earth.[19] A more philosophic
conception made the divinity an infinite power impregnating all nature with
its overflowing forces. "There is only one God, sole and supreme," wrote
Maximus of Madaura about 390, "without beginning or parentage, whose
energies, diffused through the world, we invoke under various names,
because we are ignorant of his real name. By successively addressing our
supplications to his different members we intend to honor him in his
entirety. Through the mediation of the subordinate gods the common father
both of themselves and of all me