which the study makes upon the attention and the imagination of the
student. The scientific, that is the accurate, study of history is
comparatively new. The minute care which is required in the examination
of the evidence for the facts, and the painful caution which is required
in the forming of inferences, are but inadequately appreciated. The study
requires not only attention, but also imagination. A student must have
something analogous to the power of a dramatist before he can realize the
scenery of a vanished age, or watch, as in a moving panorama, the series
and sequence of its events. He must have that power in a still greater
degree before he can so throw himself into a bygone time as to be able to
enter into the motives of the actors, and to imagine how, having such and
such a character, and surrounded by such and such circumstances, he would
himself have thought and felt and acted. But the greatest demand that
can be made upon either the attention or the imagination of a student is
that which is made by such a problem as the present, which requires us
to realize the attitude of mind, not of one man, but of a generation of
men, to move with their movements, to float upon the current of their
thoughts, and to pass with them from one attitude of mind into another.
2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own
personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject
already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a
lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of,
for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the
student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most
of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of conclusions
already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it.
We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early
Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece.
We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations, the sacred
memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by
one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the
maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings,
these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those
of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to
be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most
resolutely to have abandoned them.
We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations
which have come to us through our education. The ideas with which we
have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early
centuries of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries
before. The terms are the same, but their meaning is different. Those
of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the
connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its
most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new
connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of
centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in
some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They
have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which,
until we consciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part
of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled.
We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions
respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by
others. We have in those inductions so many moulds, so to speak, into
which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the
primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only
the provisional conclusions of earlier generations of scholars, and
stages in our own historical education; and we arrange facts in the
categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox
or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of
such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our
inquiries have to solve.
3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the
under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which
we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends
to be unconscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid
heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind,
which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of
our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of
our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts
are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be
judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments
of other generations increases in proportion as those generations recede
from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we
may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate
to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of
time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so
to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental
scenery round them. Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them.
Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental
fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of
our own; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to
find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative.
I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances:
(_a_) We tend to take with us, as we travel into bygone times, the
dualistic hypothesis—which to most of us is no hypothesis, but an
axiomatic truth—of the existence of an unbridged chasm between body and
soul, matter and spirit. The relation in our minds of the idea of matter
to the idea of spirit is such, that though we readily conceive matter
to act upon matter, and spirit upon spirit, we find it difficult or
impossible to conceive a direct action either of matter upon spirit or
of spirit upon matter. When, therefore, in studying, for example, the
ancient rites of baptism, we find expressions which seem to attribute a
virtue to the material element, we measure such expressions by a modern
standard, and regard them as containing only an analogy or a symbol. They
belong, in reality, to another phase of thought than our own. They are an
outflow of the earlier conception of matter and spirit as varying forms
of a single substance.[6] “Whatever acts, is body,” it was said. Mind is
the subtlest form of body, but it is body nevertheless. The conception
of a direct action of the one upon the other presented no difficulty. It
was imagined, for instance, that demons might be the direct causes of
diseases, because the extreme tenuity of their substance enabled them to
enter, and to exercise a malignant influence upon, the bodies of men. So
water, when exorcized from all the evil influences which might reside
in it, actually cleansed the soul.[7] The conception of the process
as symbolical came with the growth of later ideas of the relation of
matter to spirit. It is, so to speak, a rationalizing explanation of a
conception which the world was tending to outgrow.
(_b_) We take with us in our travels into the past the underlying
conception of religion as a personal bond between God and the individual
soul. We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in
which the conscience has no place. We can understand, however much we may
deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because
they ultimately rest upon the same conception: men were so profoundly
convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of
supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we
find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a
great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately
persecuted Christianity. The difficulty arises from our overlooking the
entirely different aspect under which religion presented itself to a
Roman mind. It was a matter which lay, not between the soul and God, but
between the individual and the State. Conscience had no place in it.
Worship was an ancestral usage which the State sanctioned and enforced.
It was one of the ordinary duties of life.[8] The neglect of it, and
still more the disavowal of it, was a crime. An emperor might pity the
offender for his obstinacy, but he must necessarily either compel him to
obey or punish him for disobedience.
* * * * *
It is not until we have thus realized the fact that the study of history
requires as diligent and as constant an exercise of the mental powers as
any of the physical sciences, and until we have made what may be called
the “personal equation,” disentangling ourselves as far as we can from
the theories which we have inherited or formed, and recognizing the
existence of under-currents of thought in past ages widely different
from those which flow in our own, that we shall be likely to investigate
with success the great problem that lies before us. I lay stress upon
these points, because the interest of the subject tends to obscure its
difficulties. Literature is full of fancy sketches of early Christianity;
they are written, for the most part, by enthusiasts whose imagination
soars by an easy flight to the mountain-tops which the historian can
only reach by a long and rugged road; they are read, for the most part,
by those who give them only the attention which they would give to a
shilling hand-book or to an article in a review. I have no desire, and I
am sure that you have no desire, to add one more to such fancy sketches.
The time has come for a precise study. The materials for such a study
are available. The method of such a study is determined by canons which
have been established in analogous fields of research. The difficulties
of such a study come almost entirely from ourselves, and it is a duty to
begin by recognizing them.
For the study is one not only of living interest, but also of supreme
importance. Other history may be more or less antiquarian. Its ultimate
result may be only to gratify our curiosity and to add to the stores
of our knowledge. But Christianity claims to be a present guide of our
lives. It has been so large a factor in the moral development of our
race, that we cannot set aside its claim unheard. Neither can we admit it
until we know what Christianity is. A thousand dissonant voices are each
of them professing to speak in its name. The appeal lies from them to its
documents and to its history. In order to know what it is, we must first
know both what it professed to be and what it has been. The study of the
one is the complement of the other; but it is with the latter only that
we have at present to do. We may enter upon the study with confidence,
because it is a scientific inquiry. We may hear, if we will, the solemn
tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to
conquest. It is marching in our day, almost for the first time, into
the domain of Christian history. Upon its flanks, as upon the flanks of
the physical sciences, there are scouts and skirmishers, who venture
sometimes into morasses where there is no foothold, and into ravines from
which there is no issue. But the science is marching on. “Vestigia nulla
retrorsum.” It marches, as the physical sciences have marched, with the
firm tread of certainty. It meets, as the physical sciences have met,
with opposition, and even with contumely. In front of it, as in front of
the physical sciences, is chaos; behind it is order. We may march in its
progress, not only with the confidence of scientific certainty, but also
with the confidence of Christian faith. It may show some things to be
derived which we thought to be original; and some things to be compound
which we thought to be incapable of analysis; and some things to be
phantoms which we thought to be realities. But it will add a new chapter
to Christian apologetics; it will confirm the divinity of Christianity by
showing it to be in harmony with all else that we believe to be divine;
its results will take their place among those truths which burn in the
souls of men with a fire that cannot be quenched, and light up the
darkness of this stormy sea with a light that is never dim.
LECTURE II.
GREEK EDUCATION.
The general result of the considerations to which I have already invited
your attention is, that a study of the growth and modifications of the
early forms of Christianity must begin with a study of their environment.
For a complete study, it would be necessary to examine that environment
as a whole. In some respects all life hangs together, and no single
element of it is in absolute isolation. The political and economical
features of a given time affect more or less remotely its literary and
philosophical features, and a complete investigation would take them all
into account. But since life is short, and human powers are limited,
it is necessary in this, as in many other studies, to be content with
something less than ideal completeness. It will be found sufficient in
practice to deal only with the proximate causes of the phenomena into
which we inquire; and in dealing, as we shall mainly do, with literary
effects, to deal also mainly with those features of the age which were
literary also.
The most general summary of those features is, that the Greek world of
the second and third centuries was, in a sense which, though not without
some just demur, has tended to prevail ever since, an educated world. It
was reaping the harvest which many generations had sown. Five centuries
before, the new elements of knowledge and cultured speech had begun to
enter largely into the simpler elements of early Greek life. It had
become no longer enough for men to till the ground, or to pursue their
several handicrafts, or to be practised in the use of arms. The word
σοφός, which in earlier times had been applied to one who was skilled
in any of the arts of life, who could string a bow or tune a lyre or
even trim a hedge, had come to be applied, if not exclusively, yet at
least chiefly, to one who was shrewd with practical wisdom, or who knew
the thoughts and sayings of the ancients. The original reasons, which
lay deep in the Greek character, for the element of knowledge assuming
this special form, had been accentuated by the circumstances of later
Greek history. There seems to be little reason in the nature of things
why Greece should not have anticipated modern Europe in the study of
nature, and why knowledge should not have had for its chief meaning in
earlier times that which it is tending to mean now, the knowledge of
the phenomena and laws of the physical world. The tendency to collect
and colligate and compare the facts of nature appears to be no less
instinctive than the tendency to become acquainted with the thoughts
of those who have gone before us. But Greece on the one hand had lost
political power, and on the other hand possessed in her splendid
literature an inalienable heritage. She could acquiesce with the greater
equanimity in political subjection, because in the domain of letters she
was still supreme with an indisputable supremacy. It was natural that she
should turn to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters
should be reflected upon speech. For the love of speech had become to
a large proportion of Greeks a second nature. They were a nation of
talkers. They were almost the slaves of cultivated expression. Though the
public life out of which orators had grown had passed away with political
freedom, it had left behind it a habit which in the second century of
our era was blossoming into a new spring. Like children playing at
“make-believe,” when real speeches in real assemblies became impossible,
the Greeks revived the old practice of public speaking by addressing
fictitious assemblies and arguing in fictitious courts. In the absence
of the distractions of either keen political struggles at home or wars
abroad, these tendencies had spread themselves over the large surface of
general Greek society. A kind of literary instinct had come to exist. The
mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance
with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated
speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.
Two points have to be considered in regard to that education before it
can be regarded as a cause in relation to the main subject which we are
examining: we must look first at its forms, and secondly at its mass.
It is not enough that it should have corresponded in kind to certain
effects; it must be shown to have been adequate in amount to account for
them.
I. The education was almost as complex as our own. If we except only the
inductive physical sciences, it covered the same field. It was, indeed,
not so much analogous to our own as the cause of it. Our own comes by
direct tradition from it. It set a fashion which until recently has
uniformly prevailed over the whole civilized world. We study literature
rather than nature because the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans
and the Roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed
Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths.
The two main elements were those which have been already indicated,
Grammar and Rhetoric.[9]
1. By Grammar was meant the study of literature.[10] In its original
sense of the art of reading and writing, it began as early as that art
begins among ourselves. “We are given over to Grammar,” says Sextus
Empiricus,[11] “from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes.” But
this elementary part of it was usually designated by another name,[12]
and Grammar itself had come to include all that in later times has
been designated Belles Lettres. This comprehensive view of it was of
slow growth; consequently, the art is variously defined and divided.
The division which Sextus Empiricus[13] speaks of as most free from
objection, and which will sufficiently indicate the general limits of
the subject, is into the technical, the historical, and the exegetical
elements. The first of these was the study of diction, the laying down of
canons of correctness, the distinction between Hellenisms and Barbarisms.
Upon this as much stress was laid as was laid upon academic French in the
age of Boileau. “I owe to Alexander,” says Marcus Aurelius,[14] “my habit
of not finding fault, and of not using abusive language to those who
utter a barbarous or awkward or unmusical phrase.” “I must apologize for
the style of this letter,” says the Christian Father Basil two centuries
afterwards, in writing to his old teacher Libanius; “the truth is, I
have been in the company of Moses and Elias, and men of that kind, who
tell us no doubt what is true, but in a barbarous dialect, so that your
instructions have quite gone out of my head.”[15] The second element of
Grammar was the study of the antiquities of an author: the explanation
of the names of the gods and heroes, the legends and histories, which
were mentioned. It is continued to this day in most notes upon classical
authors. The third element was partly critical, the distinguishing
between true and spurious treatises, or between true and false readings;
but chiefly exegetical, the explanation of an author’s meaning. It is
spoken of as the prophetess of the poets,[16] standing to them in the
same relation as the Delphian priestess to her inspiring god.
The main subject-matter of this literary education was the poets.
They were read, not only for their literary, but also for their moral
value.[17] They were read as we read the Bible. They were committed to
memory. The minds of men were saturated with them. A quotation from Homer
or from a tragic poet was apposite on all occasions and in every kind of
society. Dio Chrysostom, in an account of his travels, tells how he came
to the Greek colony of the Borysthenitæ, on the farthest borders of the
empire, and found that even in those remote settlements almost all the
inhabitants knew the Iliad by heart, and that they did not care to hear
about anything else.[18]
2. Grammar was succeeded by Rhetoric—the study of literature by the study
of literary expression and quasi-forensic argument. The two were not
sharply distinguished in practice, and had some elements in common. The
conception of the one no less than of the other had widened with time,
and Rhetoric, like Grammar, was variously defined and divided. It was
taught partly by precept, partly by example, and partly by practice. The
professor either dictated rules and gave lists of selected passages of
ancient authors, or he read such passages with comments upon the style,
or he delivered model speeches of his own. The first of these methods
has its literary monument in the hand-books which remain.[19] The second
survives as an institution in modern times, and on a large scale, in the
University “lecture,” and it has also left important literary monuments
in the _Scholia_ upon Homer and other great writers. The third method
gave birth to an institution which also survives in modern times. Each
of these methods was followed by the student. He began by committing
to memory both the professor’s rules and also selected passages of
good authors: the latter he recited, with appropriate modulations and
gestures, in the presence of the professor. In the next stage, he made
his comments upon them. Here is a short example which is embedded in
Epictetus:[20] the student reads the first sentence of Xenophon’s
_Memorabilia_, and makes his criticism upon it:
“‘I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on
which....’
Rather ... ‘the ground on which....’ It is neater.”
From this, or concurrently with this, the student proceeded to
compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was
gradually led to invent the structure as well as the style of what he
wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he
had the use of the professor’s library;[21] and though writing in his
native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of
art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted,
just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose.
The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore.
A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power
to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he
recited a prepared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the
same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. “You
must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped
round you,” says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his
boat, “and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and
strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you
will make my boat too heavy).”[22]