ARRIAN ON THE OATH OF THE CHRISTIANS
Up to the time of my coming to Nicopolis, my faith in the Gods had been
like that of most official and educated Romans. First I had a literary
belief not only in Zeus but also in Apollo, Athene, Demeter, and the rest
of the Gods and Goddesses of Homer, tempered by a philosophic feeling
that some of the Homeric and other myths about them, and about the less
beautiful divinities, were not true, or were true only as allegories.
In the next place I had a Roman or official belief in the destiny of
the empire, and a recognition that its unity was best maintained by
tolerating the worships of any number of national Gods and Goddesses;
provided they did not tend to sedition and conspiracy, nor to such vices
as were in contravention of the laws. Lastly, I recognised as the belief
of many philosophers—and was myself half inclined to believe—that One
God, or Zeus, so controlled the whole of things that it would hardly be
atheistic if I sometimes regarded even Apollo, and Athene, and others,
as personifying God’s attributes rather than as being Gods and Goddesses
in themselves—although I myself, without scruple and in all willingness,
should have offered them both worship and sacrifice. Personally, apart (I
think) from the influences of childhood, I always shrank from definitely
believing that the One God ever had been, or ever could be, “alone.”
It was with these confused opinions or feelings that I became a pupil of
Epictetus. And at first, whatever he asserted about God, or the Gods,
he made me believe it—as long as he was speaking. When he said “God,”
or “Zeus,” or “Father,” or “HIM,” or “THEM,” or “Providence,” or “The
Divine Being,” or “The Nature of All Things,” or whatever else, he
dragged me as it were to the new Name, and made me follow as a captive
and do it homage. But afterwards there came a reaction. The limbs of
my mind, so to speak, became tired of being dragged. I longed for rest
and found none. My homage, too, was dissipated by distraction. When
he repeated as he often did—addressing each one of us individually,
and therefore (I assumed) me among the rest—“Thou carriest about God,”
he seemed to say to me, “Look within thyself for Him whom thou must
worship.” That was not helpful, it was the reverse of helpful—at least,
to me. I felt vaguely then (and now as a Christian I know) that men have
need not only to look within, but also (and much more) to look up—up to
the Father in heaven with the aid of His Spirit on earth. It was due to
Epictetus that at this time I—however faintly—began to feel this need.
Epictetus seemed to have no consistent view either of the unity of God
or of the possibility of plural Gods. In Rome, we have three altars to
the Goddess Febris, or Fever. Epictetus once referred to Febris in the
reply of a philosopher to a tyrant. The latter says, “I have power to
cut off your head”; the former replies, “You are in the right. I quite
forgot that I must pay you homage as people do to Fever and Cholera, and
erect an altar to you, _as indeed in Rome there is an altar to Fever_.”
It was hardly possible to mistake the Master’s mockery of this worship.
On the other hand, he was bitterly sarcastic against those who denied the
existence of Demeter, the Koré her daughter, and Pluto the husband of
the Koré. These deities our Master regarded as representing bread. “O,
the gratitude,” he exclaimed, “O, the reverence of these creatures! Day
by day they eat bread; and yet they have the face to say ‘We do not know
whether there is any such a being as Demeter, or the Koré, or Pluto!’” It
never seemed to occur to him that the worshippers of Febris might retort
on him, “Day by day scores of people in Rome have the fever, and yet you
have the face to say to us Romans, ‘I do not know whether there is any
such a being as Febris or Cholera!’”
I think he never spoke of Poseidon, Ares, or Aphrodite, and hardly ever
of Apollo. Even Athene he mentioned only thrice in Arrian’s hearing
(so he told me), twice speaking of her statue by Phidias, and once
representing Zeus as bemoaning His solitude (according to some notion,
which he ridiculed) after a universal conflagration of gods and men and
things, “Miserable me! I have neither Hera, nor Athene, nor Apollo!” It
was for Zeus alone, as God, that our Teacher reserved his devotion. And
for Him he displayed a passionate enthusiasm, the absolute sincerity of
which it never entered into my mind to question; nor do I question it
now. Under this God he served as a soldier, or lived as a citizen. To
this God he testified as a witness that others might believe and worship.
In this view of human life—as being a testimony to God—his teaching was
most convincing to me, even when I felt, as I always did, that something
was wanting in any conception of God that regarded Him as ever being
“alone.”
Now I pass to another matter, not of great interest to me at the time,
but of great importance to me in its results, because it led to my first
knowledge—that could be called knowledge—of the followers of the Lord
Jesus Christ. It arose from a passage in the lecture I described in my
last chapter. Epictetus was speaking about “the whole frame of things” as
being a kind of fluid, in which the thrill of one portion affects all the
rest, and about God and the Guardian Dæmon as feeling our every motion
and thought. He concluded by calling on us to take an oath—a military
oath, or _sacramentum_, as we call it in Latin—such as soldiers take to
the Emperor. “They,” he said, “taking on themselves the life of service
for pay, swear to prefer above all things the safety of Cæsar. You, who
have been counted worthy of such vast gifts, will you not likewise swear,
and, after taking your oath, abide by it? And what shall the oath be?
Never to disobey, never to accuse, never to find fault with any of the
gifts that have been given by Him; never to do reluctantly, never to
suffer reluctantly, anything that may be necessary. This oath is like
theirs—after a fashion. The soldiers of Cæsar swear not to prefer another
to him; God’s soldiers swear to prefer themselves to everything.”
On me this came somewhat as bathos. But it was a frequent paradox with
him; and of course, in one sense, it was not a paradox but common sense.
What he meant by bidding us “prefer _ourselves_” was “prefer _virtue_,”
which he always described as each man’s true “profit.” Everyone, he
said, must prefer his own “profit” to everything else, even to father,
brothers, children, wife. Zeus Himself—so he taught—prefers His own
“profit”—which consists in being Father of all. Take away this thin
veil of apparent egotism, and the oath might be described as an oath to
live and die for righteousness, for the Logos or Word of God within us,
and, thus, for God Himself. But why, I thought, disguise loyalty under
the mask of self-seeking? This notion of a military oath taken to God,
and at the same time to oneself—and an oath, so to speak, of negative
allegiance, not to do this or that—did not inspire me with the same
enthusiasm as the more positive doctrine and the picture of the wandering
Cynic going about the world and actively doing good and destroying evil.
Arrian, however, was taking down this passage about the military oath
with even more than his usual earnestness and rapidity. “Did that impress
you?” said I, as we left the lecture-room together. “On me it fell a
little flat.” He did not answer at once. Presently, as if rousing himself
from a reverie, “Forgive me,” he said, “I was thinking of something that
occurred in our neighbourhood about fifteen years ago. You know I was
born in Bithynia. Well, about that time, there was a great outbreak of
that Jewish superstition of which you must often have heard in Rome,
practised by the followers of Christus. They are suspected of all sorts
of horrible crimes and abominations, as you know, I dare say, better than
I do, being familiar with what the common people say about them in Rome.
Moreover the new work just published by your Tacitus—a lover of truth
if any man is—severely condemns them. I am bound to say our Governor
did not think so badly of them as Tacitus does. Perhaps in Rome and in
Nero’s time they were more savage and vicious than among us in Bithynia
recently. However, that matters little. The question was not about
their private vices or virtues. Our Governor believed them guilty of
treasonable conspiracy. So he determined to stop it.
“Stop it he did; or, at all events, to a very great extent. But the
point of interest for me is, that when these fellows were had up before
our Governor—it was Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus, an intimate
friend of the Emperor Trajan—he found there was really no mischief at
all to be apprehended from them. Secundus had heard something about a
_sacramentum_, or military oath—and this is my point—which these people
were in the habit of taking at their secret meetings. Naturally this
convinced him at first that there must be something wrong. But, when he
came to look into it, the whole thing came to no more than what I will
now tell you. I am sure of my facts for I heard them from his secretary,
who had a copy of his letter to the Emperor. It was to this effect,
‘_They affirm that the sum total of their crime or error is, that they
were wont, on an appointed day, to meet together before daybreak and to
sing an alternate chant to Christus, as to a God, and to bind themselves
by an oath—not, as conspirators do, to commit some crime in common,
but to avoid committing theft, robbery, adultery, fraud, breach of
faith. This done, they break up. It is true they return to take food in
common, but it is a mere harmless repast._’ After the Governor had gone
carefully into the matter, putting a few women to the torture to get at
the truth, he came to the conclusion that this so-called military oath,
or _sacramentum_, had no harm whatever in it. The thing was merely a
perverted superstition run wild. He very sensibly adopted the mild course
of giving the poor deluded people a chance of denying their faith as they
called it. The Emperor sanctioned his mildness. Most of them recanted.
Things settled down, and promised to be very much as they were before. At
least so the Governor thought. We, outside the palace, were not quite so
sanguine. But anyhow, what struck me to-day was the similarity between
the military oath of these Christians and the military oath prescribed by
our great Teacher to his Cynics.”
“But,” said I, “does it not seem to you that our military oath ought
to be a positive one, namely, that we Cynics will go anywhere and do
anything that the General may command—and not a negative one, that we
will abstain from grumbling against His orders?” Arrian replied, “As to
that, I think our Master follows Socrates, who expressly says that he had
indeed a daemon, or at all events a daemonic voice; but that it told him
only what to avoid, not what to do.” “Surely,” replied I, “what Socrates
said on his trial was, ‘How could I be fairly described as introducing
new daemons when saying that _a voice of God manifestly points out to me
what I ought to do_?’” “I do not remember that,” said my friend, “but we
are near my rooms. Come in and let us look into Plato’s Apologia.”
So we went in, and Arrian took out of his book-case Plato’s account of
the Speech of Socrates before the jury that condemned him to death.
“There, Silanus,” said he, “you see I was right.” And he pointed to these
words, “There comes to me, as you have often heard me say, a divine and
daemonic something, which indeed my prosecutor Meletus mentioned and
burlesqued in his written indictment. This thing, in its commencement,
dates back (I believe) from my boyhood, a kind of Voice that comes to me
from time to time, and, whenever it comes, it always”—“Mark this,” said
Arrian—“_turns me back from doing that (whatever it may be) which I am
purposing to do, but never moves me forward_.”
I seemed fairly and fully confuted. But suddenly it occurred to me to ask
my friend to let me see Xenophon’s version of the same speech. He brought
it out. I was not long before I disinterred the very words that I have
quoted above, “_a Voice of God that manifestly points out to me what I
ought to do_.” And the context, too, indicated that the Voice—which he
calls _daemonic_, or a _daemonion_—gave positive directions, recognised
as such by his friends.
This very important difference between Plato and Xenophon in regard to
the daemon of Socrates, as described by Socrates himself, interested
Arrian not a little. “Come back,” he said, “in the evening, when I shall
have finished reducing my notes to writing, and let us put the two
versions side by side and see how many passages we can find agreeing.”
So I came back after sunset, and we sat down and went carefully through
them. And, as far as I remember, we could not find these two great
biographers of this great man agreeing in so much as a dozen consecutive
words in their several records of his Apologia, his only public speech.
Presently—Arrian having Xenophon in his hand and I Plato—I read out the
well-known words of Socrates about Anytus and Meletus, his accusers,
and about their power to kill him but not to hurt him. “What,” said
I, “is Xenophon’s version of this?” “He omits it altogether,” replied
Arrian; “but I see, reading on, that he puts into the mouth of Socrates
an entirely different saying about Anytus, after the condemnation. Let
me see the Plato.” Taking it from my hand, he observed, “Our Master,
Epictetus, who is continually quoting these words of Plato’s, never
quotes them exactly. ‘Anytus and Meletus may kill me but they cannot hurt
me’—that is always his condensed version. But you see it is not Plato’s,
Plato’s is much longer.”
So the conversation strayed away in a literary direction. We talked
a great deal—without much knowledge, at least on my part—about oral
tradition. I remarked on the possibilities in it of astonishing
divergences and distortions of doctrine—“unless,” said I, as I rose up
to go, “it happens, by good fortune, to be taken down at the time by
an honest fellow like you, who loves his teacher, but loves the truth
more, so that he just sets down what he hears, as he hears it.” “I do my
best,” said Arrian; “but if it were not nearly midnight, I could shew you
that even my best is not always good enough. I suspect that such sayings
of our Master as become most current will be very variously reported a
hundred years hence.”
“Good-night,” said I, and was opening the door to depart, when it flashed
upon me that all this time, although we had been discussing Socrates, and
assuming a resemblance between him and our Master, we had said nothing
about that great doctrine in the profession of which Socrates breathed
his last—prescribing a sacrifice to Æsculapius as though death were the
beginning of a higher life—I mean the immortality of the soul. “I will
not stay now,” said I, “but we have not said a word about Epictetus’s
doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul; could you lend me some
of your notes about it?” “He seldom speaks of it,” replied my friend;
“when he does, it is not always easy to distinguish between metaphor and
not-metaphor. My notes, so far, do not quite satisfy me that I have done
him justice. He is likely to touch on it in the next lecture or soon
after. I should prefer you to hear for yourself what he says.”
“One more question,” said I. “Did our Master ever, in your hearing, refer
to that last strange saying of Socrates, ‘We owe a cock to Æsculapius’?
Sometimes it seems to me the finest epigram in all Greek literature.”
“Never,” replied Arrian. “He has never mentioned it either in my hearing,
or in the hearing of those whom I have asked about it. And I have asked
many.”
Departing home I found myself almost at once forgetting our long literary
discussion about oral tradition, in the larger and deeper question
touched on in the last few minutes. Why should not Arrian have been able
to “do justice” to Epictetus in this particular subject? Was it that
our Teacher did not quite “do justice” to himself? Then I began to ask
what Epictetus had meant precisely by such expressions as that men may
become “fellow-banqueters” and even “fellow-rulers” with “the Gods.” “If
God Himself is immortal, how,” said I, “can ‘God’s own son’ fail to be
immortal also?”
All through that night, even till near dawn, I was harassed with wild
and wearying dreams. I travelled, wandering through wilderness after
wilderness in quest of Socrates and nowhere finding him. Wherever I went
I seemed to hear a strange monotonous cry that followed close behind me.
Presently I heard a flapping of wings, and I knew that the sound was the
crowing of the cock that was to be offered for Socrates to Æsculapius.
Then it became a mocking, inarticulate, human voice striving to utter
articulate speech. At last I heard distinctly, “If Zeus could have, he
would have. If he could have, he would have. But he could not.”