ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CHURCH OF ANTIOCH.
The new faith was propagated from one neighborhood to another with
astonishing rapidity. The members of the Church of Jerusalem who had
been dispersed immediately after the death of Stephen, pushing their
conquests along the coast of Phœnicia, reached Cyprus and Antioch.
They were as yet guided by an unvarying principle of refusing to preach
the gospel to the Jews.[12.1] Antioch, "the metropolis of the East,"
the third city of the world,[12.2] was the centre of this Christendom
of northern Syria. It was a city with a population of more than 500,000
souls, almost as large as Paris before its recent extensions,[12.3]
and the residence of the Imperial Legate of Syria. Suddenly advanced
to a high degree of splendor by the Seleucidæ, it had only to profit
by the Roman occupation of it. In general, the Seleucidæ had surpassed
the Romans in the taste for theatrical decorations as applied to great
cities. Temples, aqueducts, baths, basilicas, nothing was wanting
at Antioch in what constituted a grand Syrian city of that period.
The streets flanked by colonnades, with their cross-roads decorated
with statues, had there more of symmetry and regularity than anywhere
else.[12.4] A _Corso_, ornamented with four ranges of columns, forming
two covered galleries with a wide avenue in the midst, crossed the city
from one side to the other,[12.5] the length of which was thirty-six
stadia (more than a league).[12.6] But Antioch not only possessed
immense edifices of public utility,[12.7] she had that also which few
of the Syrian cities possessed--the noblest specimens of Grecian art,
wonderfully beautiful statues,[12.8] classical works of a delicacy of
detail which the age was no longer capable of imitating. Antioch, from
its foundation, had been altogether a Grecian city. The Macedonians
of Antigone and Seleucus had imported into that country of the lower
Orontes their most lively recollections, their worship, and the names
of their country.[12.9] The Grecian mythology was there adopted as
it were in a second home; they pretended to exhibit in the country a
crowd of "holy places" forming part of this mythology. The city was
full of the worship of Apollo and of the nymphs. Daphne, an enchanting
place two short hours distant from the city, reminded the conquerors of
the pleasantest fictions. It was a sort of plagiarism, a counterfeit
of the myths of the mother country, analogous to these adventurous
transportations which the primitive tribes carried with them in their
travels; their mythical geography, their Berecyntha, their Arnanda,
their Ida, and their Olympus. These Greek fables constituted for them a
very old religion, and one scarcely more serious than the metamorphoses
of Ovid. The ancient religions of the country, particularly that of
Mount Cassius,[12.10] contributed some little gravity to it. But Syrian
levity, Babylonian charlatanism, and all the impostures of Asia,
mingled at this limit of the two worlds, had made Antioch the capital
of lies and the sink of every description of infamy.
Besides the Greek population, indeed, which in no part of the East
(with the exception of Alexandria) was as numerous as here, Antioch
numbered amongst its population a considerable number of native
Syrians, speaking Syriac.[12.11] These natives composed a low class,
inhabiting the suburbs of the great city and the populous villages
which formed a vast suburb[12.12] all around it, Charandama, Ghisira,
Gaudigura, and Apate (chiefly Syrian names).[12.13] Marriages between
the Syrians and the Greeks were common. Seleucus having formerly
made naturalization a legal obligation binding on every stranger
establishing himself in the city, Antioch, at the end of three
centuries and a half of its existence, became one of the places in
the world where race was most intermingled with race. The degradation
of the people there was terrible. The peculiarity of these focuses of
moral putrefaction is, to reduce all the races of mankind to the same
level. The degradation of certain Levantine cities, dominated by the
spirit of intrigue, delivered up entirely to low cunning, can scarce
give us a conception of the degree of corruption reached by the human
race at Antioch. It was an inconceivable medley of merry-andrews,
quacks, buffoons,[12.14] magicians, miracle-mongers, sorcerers,{12.15}
priests, impostors; a city of races, games, dances, processions,
fêtes, debauches, of unbridled luxury, of all the follies of the East,
of the most unhealthy superstitions, and of the fanaticism of the
orgy.[12.16] By turns servile and ungrateful, cowardly and insolent,
the people of Antioch were the perfect model of those crowds devoted
to Cæsarism, without country, without nationality, without family
honor, without a name to keep. The great _Corso_ which traversed
the city was like a theatre, where rolled, day after day, the waves
of a trifling, light-headed, changeable, insurrection-loving[12.17]
populace--a populace sometimes _spirituel_,[12.18] occupied with
songs, parodies, squibs, impertinence of all sorts.[12.19] The city
was very literary,[12.20] but literary only in the literature of
rhetoricians.{12.21} The sights were strange; there were some games
in which bands of naked young girls took part in all the exercises,
with a mere fillet around them;[12.22] at the celebrated festival of
Näiouma, troupes of courtezans swarmed in public in basins[12.23]
filled with limpid water.[12.24] This fête was like an intoxication,
like a dream of Sardanapalus, where all the pleasures, all the
debaucheries, not excluding some of a more delicate kind, were
unrolled pell-mell. This river of dirt, which, making its exit by the
mouth of the Orontes, was about to invade Rome,[12.25] had here its
principal sources. Two hundred decurions were employed in regulating
the religious ceremonies and celebrations.[12.26] The municipality
possessed great public domains, the rents of which the decemvirs
divided between the poor citizens.[12.27] Like all cities of pleasure,
Antioch had a lowest section of the people, living on the public or
on sordid gains. The beauty of works of art and the infinite charm
of nature[12.28] prevented this moral degradation from degenerating
entirely into ugliness and vulgarity. The site of Antioch is one of
the most picturesque in the world. The city occupied the interval
between the Orontes and the slopes of Mount Silpius, one of the spurs
of Mount Casius. Nothing could equal the abundance and beauty of the
waters.[12.29] The fortified space, climbing up perpendicular rocks,
by a real master-work of military architecture,[12.30] inclosed the
summit of the mountains, and formed with the rocks at a tremendous
height an indented crown of marvellous effect. This disposition
of their ramparts, uniting the advantage of the ancient acropoles
with those of the great walled cities, was in general preferred by
the Generals of Alexander, as one sees in the Pierian Seleucia, in
Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Thessalonica. The result was various astonishing
perspectives. Antioch had within its walls mountains seven hundred feet
in height, perpendicular rocks, torrents, precipices, deep ravines,
cascades, inaccessible caves; in the midst of all these, delicious
gardens.[12.31] A thick wood of myrtles, of flowering box, of laurels,
of plants always green--and of the most tender green--rocks carpeted
with pinks, with hyacinth, and cyclamens, give to these wild heights
the aspect of gardens hung in the air. The variety of the flowers,
the freshness of the turf, composed of an incredible number of minute
grasses, the beauty of the plane trees which border the Orontes,
inspire the gaiety, the tinge of sweet scent with which the beautiful
genius of Chrysostom, Libanus, and Julian is, as it were, intoxicated.
On the right bank of the river stretches a vast plain bordered on one
side by the Amanus, and the oddly truncated mountains of Pieria; on
the other side by the plateaus of Chyrrestica,[12.32] behind which
is hidden the dangerous neighborhood of the Arab and the desert. The
valley of the Orontes, which opens to the west, brings this interior
basin into communication with the sea, or rather with the vast world in
the bosom of which the Mediterranean has constituted from all time a
sort of neutral highway and federal bond.
Amongst the different colonies which the liberal ordinances of the
Seleucidæ had attracted to the capital of Syria, that of the Jews was
one of the most numerous;[12.33] it dated from the time of Seleucus
Nicator, and was governed by the same laws as the Greeks.[12.34]
Although the Jews had an ethnarch of their own, their relations with
the pagans were very frequent. Here, as at Alexandria, these relations
often degenerated into quarrels and aggressions.[12.35] On the other
hand, they afforded a field for an active religious propagandism. The
polytheism of the officials becoming more and more insufficient to
meet the wants of serious persons, the Grecian and Jewish philosophies
attracted all those whom the vain pomps of paganism could not satisfy.
The number of proselytes was considerable. From the first days of
Christianity, Antioch had furnished to the Church of Jerusalem one of
its most influential members, viz. Nicolas, one of the deacons.[12.36]
There existed there promising germs, which only waited for a ray of
grace to burst forth into bloom and bear the most excellent fruits
which had hitherto been produced.
The church of Antioch owed its foundation to some original
believers from Cyprus and Cyrene, who had already been zealous in
preaching.[12.37] Up to this time they had only addressed themselves
to the Jews. But in a city where pure Jews--Jews who were proselytes,
"people fearing God"--or half-Jews, half-pagans and pure pagans, lived
together,[12.38] confined preachings, restricted to a group of houses,
became impossible. That feeling of religious aristocracy on which the
Jews of Jerusalem so much prided themselves, had no existence in these
large cities, where civilization was altogether of the profane sort,
where the atmosphere was more expanded, and where prejudices were
less firmly rooted. The Cypriot and Cyrenian missionaries were then
constrained to depart from their rule. They preached to the Jews and to
the Greeks indifferently.{12.39}
The reciprocal dispositions of the Jewish and of the pagan population
appeared at this time to have been very unsatisfactory.[12.40] But
circumstances of another kind probably subserved the new ideas. The
earthquake, which had done serious damage to the city on 23d March, of
the year 37, still occupied their minds. The whole city was talking
about an impostor named Debborius, who pretended to prevent the
recurrence of such accidents by ridiculous talismans.[12.41] This
sufficed to direct preoccupied minds towards supernatural matters.
However that may have been, great was the success of the Christian
preaching. A young, innovating, and ardent Church, full of the future,
because it was composed of the most diverse elements, was quickly
founded. All the gifts of the Holy Spirit were there poured out, and it
was then easy to perceive that this new Church, emancipated from the
strict Mosaism which traced an irrefragable circle around Jerusalem,
would become the second cradle of Christianity. Assuredly, Jerusalem
will remain for ever the capital of the Christian world; nevertheless,
the point of departure of the church of the Gentiles, the primal focus
of Christian missions, was, in truth, Antioch. It is there, for the
first time, that a Christian church was established, divorced from
the bonds of Judaism; it is there that the great propaganda of the
Apostolic age was established; it was there that St. Paul assumed a
definite character. Antioch marks the second halting-place of the
progress of Christianity, and in respect of Christian nobility, neither
Rome, nor Alexandria, nor Constantinople can be at all compared with it.
The topography of ancient Antioch is so effaced that we should search
in vain over its site, nearly destitute as it is of any vestiges of the
antique, for the point to which to attach such grand recollections.
Here, as everywhere, Christianity was, doubtless, established in
the poor quarters of the city and among the petty tradesfolk. The
basilica, which is called "the old" and "apostolic"{12.42} to the
fourteenth century, was situated in the street called Singon, near the
Pantheon.[12.43] But no one knows where this Pantheon was. Tradition
and certain vague analogies induced us to search the primitive
Christian quarter alongside the gate, which even to-day is still called
Paul's gate, _Bâb-bolos_,[12.44] and at the foot of the mountain, named
by Procopius _Stavrin_, which overlooks the south-west coast from the
ramparts of Antioch.[12.45] It was one of the quarters of the town
which least abounded in pagan monuments. There we saw the remains of
ancient sanctuaries dedicated to St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John.
There appeared to have been the quarter where Christianity was longest
maintained after the Mohammedan conquest. There too, as it appeared,
was the quarter of "the saints," in opposition to the general profanity
of Antioch. The rock is honeycombed like a beehive, with grottoes
formerly used by the Anchorites. When one walks on these steeply cut
declivities, where, about the fourth century, the good Stylites,
disciples at once of India and of Galilee, of Jesus and of Cakya-Mouni,
disdainfully contemplated the voluptuous city from the summit of their
pillar or from their flower-adorned cavern,[12.46] it is probable
that one is not far from the very spots where Peter and Paul dwelt.
The Church of Antioch is the one whose history is most authentic and
least encumbered with fables. Christian tradition, in a city where
Christianity was perpetuated with so much vigor, ought to possess
some value. The prevailing language of the Church of Antioch was the
Greek. It is, however, quite probable that the suburbs where Syriac
was spoken furnished a number of converts to the sect. In consequence,
Antioch already contained the germ of two rival and, at a later period,
hostile Churches, the one speaking Greek, and now represented by the
Syrian Greeks, whether orthodox or Catholics; the other, whose actual
representatives are the Maronites, having previously spoken Syriac and
guarding it still as if it were a sacred tongue. The Maronites, who
under their entirely modern Catholicism conceal a high antiquity, are
probably the last descendants of those Syrians anterior to Seleucus,
of those suburbans or _pagani_ of Ghisra, Charandama, etc.,[12.47] who
from the first ages became a separate Church, were persecuted by the
orthodox emperors as heretics, and escaped into the Libanus,[12.48]
or, from hatred of the Grecian Church and in consequence of deeper
sympathies, allied themselves with the Latins.
As to the converted Jews at Antioch, they were also very
numerous.[12.49] But we must believe that they accepted from the very
first a fraternal alliance with the Gentiles.[12.50] It was then on the
shores of the Orontes that the religious fusion of races, dreamed of by
Jesus, or to speak more fully, by six centuries of prophets, became a
reality.