This was not due to disregard of the laws against Christians nor to indifference to suspected dangers to the Empire arising from the new religion, but to the policy of religious syncretism which had come in with the family of Severus.
It was in the reign of Alexander that syncretism favorable to Christianity was at its height.
At Dendera it is said that in the ram of Mendes Osiris grew young again; and in the later days of solar syncretism the four souls of Ra and Osiris, of Shu and Khepera, were united in its body.
It belongs to an age of religious syncretism and materialistic philosophy; the mythological beings of popular belief are resolved into cosmological principles, and the mythological dress in which they appear has a theatrical effect.
With the spread of the sun-worship of Heliopolis and the spirit of pantheistic syncretism which accompanied it, the individuality of the old god of Memphis became still further lost.
This was denounced by strict Lutherans as Syncretismand Cryptocatholicism.
We find only a positional relationship between the different ethnic elements, a syncretism or superposition of characteristics, and a consequent readiness to disunite and form other unions.
The syncretism between Paganism and Christianity has not been destroyed by the Reformation.
If we seek to understand the meaning of Elijah's stand for Jehovah, we shall see that it was first of all a protest against the syncretism of the Baal and Jehovah religions.
We have now to trace the steps by which this syncretism was broken up, and the advance made to the purely monotheistic conception and the lofty morality of the great literary Prophets.
Nothing but this process of syncretism can explain the condition of religion in the subsequent history, and it is needed to enable us to understand both the difficulty of the work of the Prophets and the form their message takes.
They probably hoped by these conservative manners to destroy the syncretism between Baal and Jehovah; for the only other mention of the sect in the Old Testament is in connection with the extirpation of the house of Ahab (2 Kings x.
The syncretic nature of the signs of practical experiences were reflected in the syncretism of tools and signs.
Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretism of communities in which individuals are identified through their work.
Parallel to the loss of the syncretic nature of the human being at the level of the individual, we notice the composite syncretism of the community.
This process was itself correlated to the diversification of resources and types of practical experiences preserving syncretism at the community level.
It must not be supposed, however, that the universal religion sprang from the philosophic or religioussyncretism of the later ages of Graeco-Roman civilisation.
Syncretism holds that there are truths in all separate religions, but that none of them has all the truth, and hence that one must select what is good from each, rejecting the evil.
From this syncretism emerged the prudent non-committal eclecticism of Cicero, the last product of Academic development.
The period of syncretism has fully come, and Zoroastrianism in particular, more indirectly than directly, is exercising an attractive power upon the Jews.
The object of his work was to free the doctrine from the syncretism of Ammonius and to reproduce the pure doctrine of Aristotle.
From these three arguments he developed an elaborate theosophy which was a syncretism of oriental mysticism and pure Greek metaphysic, and may be regarded as representing the climax of Jewish philosophy.
A stroke of ecclesiastical dexterity, it may have been, but scarcely a lawful example or an illustrious and commendable specimen of syncretism in religion.
They attempted syncretism and succeeded in their scheme.
In the syncretism of the age, which strove to gather up all the forces of heathenism and make them converge towards a spiritual unity, Magna Mater and Attis leagued their forces with the conquering Mithra.
Syncretism set in; the deities of the two races were reconciled and identified.
In that meeting-point of the East and West, of all systems of thought and worship, syncretism blended all faiths.
In thesyncretism of the time, Serapis came to be identified with the Greek god of healing, and patients sleeping in Egyptian temples received in dreams inspired prescriptions for their maladies.
If there was a visible tendency to syncretism and monotheistic faith in the second century, there was a no less manifest drift to the endless multiplication of spiritual powers.
It threw many of the old gods into the shade, but its syncretism also found a place for many of them.
The provinces and attributes of kindred deities melted into one another and were finally identified; syncretism was in the air.
For, indeed, in the syncretism and monotheistic drift of the age, the more powerful worships lost the hardness of their original lines and tended to absorption and assimilation.
Syncretism had been at work in Italy centuries before the days of Plutarch and Aristides.
But the syncretism of the second and third centuries came to its support.
In the syncretism of that age, the age of Gnosticism, rites and doctrines passed easily from one system to another.
In this treatise he takes up a position more nearly akin to heathen syncretism than Tertullian.
But an immense number of problems were at the same time raised, especially when, as in the case of the Alexandrians, heathen syncretism in the entire breadth of its development was united with the doctrine of the Church.
Once more, syncretism came in as a mythopoeic influence.
There appears to be a very early example of syncretismin Australia.
At the time the Romans came into contact with Syria, it had already passed through a period of syncretism similar to the one we can study with greater precision in the Latin world.
I shall try to indicate briefly what their share in the pagan syncretism was.
Had not a complacentsyncretism engendered a multiplication of sects?
Just as a process of syncretism has given rise to cults of animal gods, tree spirits tend to become detached from the trees, which are thenceforward only their abodes; and here again animism has begun to pass into polytheism.
Amid the prevailingsyncretism of the Greco-Roman world, the religion of Paul, with the religion of Israel, stands absolutely alone.
Mention has already been made of the syncretism of the age; various religions were mingled in a limitless variety of combinations.
It must be remembered that the paganism of the Hellenistic age had elevated syncretism to a system; it had absolutely no objection of principle against receiving elements from every source.
On the contrary, the Hellenistic age was the age of syncretism par excellence.
What is more likely than that in an age of syncretism the adherents of pagan religion should borrow weapons from so successful a rival?
Christian mores in the western empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores.
The church embraced in its fold Latin, Teutonic, Greek, and Slavonic nations, and it produced a grand syncretism of their mores, while it favored those which were Latin.
When groups are compounded by intermarriage, intercourse, conquest, immigration, or slavery, syncretism of the folkways takes place.
The origin of them is in the mores of the classes who accepted Christianity, which were subjected to a grand syncretism in the first centuries of Christianity.
Finally, we come to consider agitation to produce changes in the mores, and we endeavor to study the ways in which the changes in the mores do come about, especially syncretism (secs.
Those which now pass for Christian in western Europe are the result of the syncretism of two thousand years.
This legend, which under local modifications and much syncretism existed until long after Christianity was introduced in the Greco-Roman world, coincides with the laws of Hammurabi as to harlot priestesses.
About the time of Christ, by syncretism all the religions took on a dramatic form in their ritual, with liturgies and responses, on account of the attractiveness of that form for worshipers.
Then syncretism began, and a body of sectarian notions was formed.
Contiguity, neighborhood, or even literature may suffice to bring about syncretism of the mores.
A pantheistic view, again, arose as we saw among various priesthoods in the monarchies where syncretism arose out of political aggregations.
It involved further a syncretismor a combining of various Gods into one, [233] and also an esoteric explanation of the God-myths as symbolical of natural processes, or else of mystical ideas.
We can indeed trace the normal movement of syncretism in the cults, and the normal tendency to improve their ethics.
If Judaism as a system of doctrine is necessarily syncretistic in its conception of God, then we may expect the same syncretism in its theory of God's relation to man.
Here again we meet the curioussyncretism which we have so often observed.
By the syncretism which has been already described Jeremiah's New Covenant was not regarded as new.
The combination of such a memento of the Most Chaste with the emblem of supreme virility is syncretism indeed!
There are, on the contrary, indications of Vishnuite leanings, of Buddhist heresy, of a syncretism no less pronounced than that of Prambanan and the Mendoot.
Truly there ought to be a limit to syncretism and this last mentioned mixture of heterogeneous elements soon affects the visitor in a manner so offensive that retreat becomes a matter of necessity.
This and thesyncretism discernible in nearly all the chandis of Java, shows the religious tolerance of the Javanese in the Hindu period.
This tablet is due to the syncretism of Roman times.
The decay of the old political cults and syncretism produced a disposition in favour of monotheism both among the cultured classes who had been prepared for it by philosophy, and also gradually among the masses.
In some passages the Christianity of the Homilies really looks like a syncretism composed of the common Christianity, the Jewish Christianity, Gnosticism, and the criticism of Apelles.
The Neoplatonic philosophy therefore presupposes the religious syncretism of the third century, and cannot be understood without it.
It is the final fruit of the developments resulting from the political, national and religious syncretism which arose from the undertakings of Alexander the Great, and the Romans.
For the Jewish religion syncretism signified the shaking of the authority of the Old Testament by a qualitative distinction of its different parts, as also doubt as to the identity of the supreme God with the national God.
