In both
cults the final aim was the attainment of spiritual and eternal life.
Moreover, both possessed essential features which admitted, if they
did not encourage, an assimilation with Christianity. Both of them,
if forced to yield ground to their powerful rival, could, with a fair
show of reason, claim that they had been not vanquished, but
fulfilled, that their teaching had, in Christianity, attained its
normal term.
The extracts given above will show the striking analogy between the
higher doctrine of Mithraism, and the fundamental teaching of its great
rival, a resemblance that was fully admitted, and which became the
subject of heated polemic. Greek philosophers did not hesitate to
establish a parallel entirely favourable to Mithraism, while Christian
apologists insisted that such resemblances were the work of the Devil,
a line of argument which, as we have seen above, they had already
adopted with regard to the older Mysteries. It is a matter of
historical fact that at one moment the religious fate of the West hung
in the balance, and it was an open question whether Mithraism or
Christianity would be the dominant Creed.[8]
On the other hand we have also seen that certainly one early Christian
sect, the Naassenes, while equally regarding the Logos as the centre
of their belief, held the equivalent deity to be Attis, and frequented
the Phrygian Mysteries as the most direct source of spiritual
enlightenment, while the teaching as to the Death and Resurrection
of the god, and the celebration of a Mystic Feast, in which the
worshippers partook of the Food and Drink of Eternal Life, offered
parallels to Christian doctrine and practice to the full as striking
as any to be found in the Persian faith.
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