first instance, to note the broad distinction which exists between what
in the primitive churches was known as “prophesying,” and that which
in subsequent times came to be known as “preaching.” I lay the more
stress upon the distinction for the accidental reason that, in the first
reaction against the idea that “prophecy” necessarily meant “prediction,”
it was maintained—and with a certain reservation the contention was
true—that a “prophet” meant a “preacher.” The reservation is, that
the prophet was not merely a preacher but a spontaneous preacher. He
preached because he could not help it, because there was a divine breath
breathing within him which must needs find an utterance. It is in this
sense that the prophets of the early churches were preachers. They were
not church officers appointed to discharge certain functions. They were
the possessors of a _charisma_, a divine gift which was not official but
personal. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from
God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” They did not practise beforehand how
or what they should say; for “the Holy Ghost taught them in that very
hour what they should say.” Their language was often, from the point of
view of the rhetorical schools, a barbarous patois. They were ignorant
of the rules both of style and of dialectic. They paid no heed to
refinements of expression. The greatest preacher of them all claimed to
have come among his converts, in a city in which Rhetoric flourished, not
with the persuasiveness of human logic, but with the demonstration which
was afforded by spiritual power.
Of that “prophesying” of the primitive churches it is not certain that
we possess any monument. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of
Jude are perhaps representatives of it among the canonical books of the
New Testament. The work known as the Second Epistle of Clement is perhaps
a representative of the form which it took in the middle of the second
century; but though it is inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, it is rather
more artistic in its form than a purely prophetic utterance is likely to
have been.
In the course of the second century, this original spontaneity of
utterance died almost entirely away. It may almost be said to have died a
violent death. The dominant parties in the Church set their faces against
it. The survivals of it in Asia Minor were formally condemned. The
Montanists, as they were called, who tried to fan the lingering sparks of
it into a flame, are ranked among heretics. And Tertullian is not even
now admitted into the calendar of the Saints, because he believed the
Montanists to be in the right.
It was inevitable that it should be so. The growth of a confederation
of Christian communities necessitated the definition of a basis of
confederation. Such a definition, and the further necessity of guarding
it, were inconsistent with that free utterance of the Spirit which
had existed before the confederation began. Prophesying died when the
Catholic Church was formed.
In place of prophesying came preaching. And preaching is the result
of the gradual combination of different elements. In the formation of
a great institution it is inevitable that, as time goes on, different
elements should tend to unite. To the original functions of a bishop,
for example, were added by degrees the functions—which had originally
been separate—of teacher.[194] In a similar way were fused together, on
the one hand, teaching—that is, the tradition and exposition of the
sacred books and of the received doctrine; and, on the other hand,
exhortation—that is, the endeavour to raise men to a higher level of
moral and spiritual life. Each of these was a function which, assuming
a certain natural aptitude, could be learned by practice. Each of them
was consequently a function which might be discharged by the permanent
officers of the community, and discharged habitually at regular intervals
without waiting for the fitful flashes of the prophetic fire. We
consequently find that with the growth of organization there grew up
also, not only a fusion of teaching and exhortation, but also the gradual
restriction of the liberty of addressing the community to the official
class.
It was this fusion of teaching and exhortation that constituted the
essence of the homily: its form came from the sophists. For it was
natural that when addresses, whether expository or hortatory, came to
prevail in the Christian communities, they should be affected by the
similar addresses which filled a large place in contemporary Greek life.
It was not only natural but inevitable that when men who had been trained
in rhetorical methods came to make such addresses, they should follow
the methods to which they were accustomed. It is probable that Origen
is not only the earliest example whose writings have come down to us,
but also one of the earliest who took into the Christian communities
these methods of the schools. He lectured, as the contemporary teachers
seem to have lectured, every day: his subject-matter was the text of the
Scriptures, as that of the rhetoricians and sophists by his side was
Homer or Chrysippus: his addresses, like those of the best professors,
were carefully prepared: he was sixty years of age, we are told, before
he preached an extempore sermon.[195]
When the Christian communities emerge into the clearer light of the
fourth century, the influence of the rhetorical schools upon them begins
to be visible on a large scale and with permanent effects. The voice of
the prophet had ceased, and the voice of the preacher had begun. The
greatest Christian preachers of the fourth century had been trained to
rhetorical methods, and had themselves taught rhetoric. Basil and Gregory
Nazianzen studied at Athens under the famous professors Himerius and
Prohæresius: Chrysostom studied under the still more famous Libanius,
who on his death-bed said of him that he would have been his worthiest
successor “if the Christians had not stolen him.”[196] The discourses
came to be called by the same names as those of the Greek professors.
They had originally been called _homilies_—a word which was unknown
in this sense in pre-Christian times, and which denoted the familiar
intercourse and direct personal addresses of common life. They came to be
called by the technical terms of the schools—discourses, disputations,
or speeches.[197] The distinction between the two kinds of terms is
clearly shown by a later writer, who, speaking of a particular volume
of Chrysostom’s addresses, says, “They are called ‘speeches’ (λόγοι),
but they are more like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he
again and again addresses his hearers as actually present before his
eyes.”[198] The form of the discourses tended to be the same: if you
examine side by side a discourse of Himerius or Themistius or Libanius,
and one of Basil or Chrysostom or Ambrose, you will find a similar
artificiality of structure, and a similar elaboration of phraseology.
They were delivered under analogous circumstances. The preacher sat in
his official chair: it was an exceptional thing for him to ascend the
reader’s _ambo_, the modern “pulpit:”[199] the audience crowded in front
of him, and frequently interrupted him with shouts of acclamation. The
greater preachers tried to stem the tide of applause which surged round
them: again and again Chrysostom begs his hearers to be silent: what
he wants is, not their acclamations, but the fruits of his preaching
in their lives.[200] There is one passage which not only illustrates
this point, but also affords a singular analogy to the remonstrance of
Epictetus which was quoted just now:
“There are many preachers who make long sermons: if they are
well applauded, they are as glad as if they had obtained a
kingdom: if they bring their sermon to an end in silence,
their despondency is worse, I may almost say, than hell. It is
this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons
that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears
with their intonation and the structure of their phrases, just
as if you were listening to singers and lute-players. And we
preachers humour your fancies, instead of trying to crush them.
We act like a father who gives a sick child a cake or an ice,
or something else that is merely nice to eat—just because he
asks for it; and takes no pains to give him what is good for
him; and then when the doctors blame him says, ‘I could not
bear to hear my child cry.’.... That is what we do when we
elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and harmonies,
to please and not to profit, to be admired and not to instruct,
to delight and not to touch you, to go away with your applause
in our ears, and not to better your conduct. Believe me, I
am not speaking at random: when you applaud me as I speak, I
feel at the moment as it is natural for a man to feel. I will
make a clean breast of it. Why should I not? I am delighted
and overjoyed. And then when I go home and reflect that the
people who have been applauding me have received no benefit,
and indeed that whatever benefit they might have had has been
killed by the applause and praises, I am sore at heart, and I
lament and fall to tears, and I feel as though I had spoken
altogether in vain, and I say to myself, What is the good of
all your labours, seeing that your hearers don’t want to reap
any fruit out of all that you say? And I have often thought of
laying down a rule absolutely prohibiting all applause, and
urging you to listen in silence.”[201]
And there is a passage near the end of Gregory Nazianzen’s greatest
sermon, in which the human nature of which Chrysostom speaks bursts forth
with striking force: after the famous peroration in which after bidding
farewell one by one to the church and congregation which he loved, to the
several companies of his fellow-workers, and to the multitudes who had
thronged to hear him preach, he turns to the court and his opponents the
Arian courtiers—
“Farewell, princes and palaces, the royal court and
household—whether ye be faithful to the king I know not, ye
are nearly all of you unfaithful to God.” (There was evidently
a burst of applause, and he interrupts his peroration with an
impromptu address.) “Yes—clap your hands, shout aloud, exalt
your orator to heaven: your malicious and chattering tongue has
ceased: it will not cease for long: it will fight (though I am
absent) with writing and ink: but just for the moment we are
silent.” (Then the peroration is resumed.) “Farewell, O great
and Christian city....”[202]
I will add only one more instance of the way in which the habits of
the sophists flowed into the Christian churches. Christian preachers,
like the sophists, were sometimes peripatetic; they went from place to
place, delivering their orations and making money by delivering them.
The historians Socrates and Sozomen[203] tell an instructive story of
two Syrian bishops, Severianus of Gabala and Antiochus of Ptolemais
(St. Jean d’Acre). They were both famous for their rhetoric, though
Severianus could not quite get rid of his Syrian accent. Antiochus went
to Constantinople, and stayed there a long time, preaching frequently
in the churches, and making a good deal of money thereby. On his return
to Syria, Severianus, hearing about the money, resolved to follow his
example: he waited for some time, exercised his rhetoric, got together a
large stock of sermons, and then went to Constantinople. He was kindly
received by the bishop, and soon became both a great popular preacher and
a favourite at court. The fate of many preachers and court favourites
overtook him: he excited great jealousy, was accused of heresy and
banished from the city; and only by the personal intercession of the
Empress Eudoxia was he received back again into ecclesiastical favour.
* * * * *
Such are some of the indications of the influence of Greek Rhetoric
upon the early churches. It created the Christian sermon. It added to
the functions of church officers a function which is neither that of
the exercise of discipline, nor of administration of the funds, nor
of taking the lead in public worship, nor of the simple tradition of
received truths, but that of either such an exegesis of the sacred books
as the Sophists gave of Homer, or such elaborated discourses as they
also gave upon the speculative and ethical aspects of religion. The
result was more far-reaching than the creation of either an institution
or a function. If you look more closely into history, you will find that
Rhetoric killed Philosophy. Philosophy died, because for all but a small
minority it ceased to be real. It passed from the sphere of thought and
conduct to that of exposition and literature. Its preachers preached,
not because they were bursting with truths which could not help finding
expression, but because they were masters of fine phrases and lived in
an age in which fine phrases had a value. It died, in short, because it
had become sophistry. But sophistry is of no special age or country. It
is indigenous to all soils upon which literature grows. No sooner is
any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer
than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the
style’s sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or
to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without
the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice
of the present. So it has been with Christianity. It came into the
educated world in the simple dress of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won
that world by the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its
brotherhood, by its divine message of consolation and of hope. Around
it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who persuaded it to change its
dress and to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby
to win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest at
the price of reality. With that its progress stopped. There has been an
element of sophistry in it ever since; and so far as in any age that
element has been dominant, so far has the progress of Christianity been
arrested. Its progress is arrested now, because many of its preachers
live in an unreal world. The truths they set forth are truths of
utterance rather than truths of their lives. But if Christianity is to
be again the power that it was in its earliest ages, it must renounce
its costly purchase. A class of rhetorical chemists would be thought of
only to be ridiculed: a class of rhetorical religionists is only less
anomalous because we are accustomed to it. The hope of Christianity is,
that the class which was artificially created may ultimately disappear;
and that the sophistical element in Christian preaching will melt, as a
transient mist, before the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come,
who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone by, will speak only
“as the Spirit gives them utterance.”
LECTURE V.
CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY.
The power of generalizing and of forming abstract ideas exists, or at
least is exercised, in varying degrees among different races and at
different times. The peculiar feature of the intellectual history of
the Greeks is the rapidity with which the power was developed, and the
strength of the grasp which it had upon them.
The elaboration of one class of such ideas, those of form and quantity,
led to the formation of a group of sciences, the mathematical sciences,
which hold a permanent place. The earliest and most typical of these
sciences is geometry. In it, the attention is drawn away from all the
other characteristics of material things, and fixed upon the single
characteristic of their form. The forms are regarded in themselves. The
process of abstraction or analysis reaches its limit in the point, and
from that limit the mind, making a new departure, begins the process of
construction or synthesis. Complex ideas are formed by the addition of
one simple idea to another, and having been so formed can be precisely
defined. Their constituent elements can be distinctly stated, and a clear
boundary drawn round the whole. They can be so marked off from other
ideas that the idea which one man has formed can be communicated to and
represented in another man’s mind. The inferences which, assuming certain
“axioms” to be true and certain “postulates” to be granted, are made by
one man, are accepted by another man or at once disproved. There is no
question of mere probability, nor any halting between two opinions. The
inferences are not only true but certain.
The result is, that there are not two sciences of geometry, but one: all
who study it are agreed as to both its definitions and its inferences.
The elaboration of another class of abstract ideas, those of quality,
marched at first by a parallel road. To a limited extent such a parallel
march is possible. The words which are used to express sensible
qualities suggest the same ideas to different minds. They are applied by
different minds to the same objects. But the limits of such an agreement
are narrow. When we pass from the abstract ideas of qualities, or
generalizations as to substances, which can be tested by the senses, to
such ideas as those, for example, of courage or justice, law or duty,
though the words suggest, on the whole, the same ideas to one man as to
another, not all men would uniformly apply the same words to the same
actions. The phenomena which suggest such ideas assume a different form
and colour as they are regarded from different points of view. They enter
into different combinations. They are not sharply marked out by lines
which would be universally recognized. The attention of different men
is arrested by different features. There is consequently no universally
recognized definition of them. Nor is such a definition possible. The
ideas themselves tend to shade off into their contraries. There is a
fringe of haze round each of them. The result is that assertions about
them vary. There is not one system of philosophy only; there are many.
* * * * *
Between these two classes of generalizations and abstractions, those
of quantity and those of quality or substance, many Greek thinkers do
not appear to have made any clear distinction. Ideas of each class
were regarded as equally capable of being defined; the canons of
inference which were applicable to the one were conceived to be equally
applicable to the other: and the certainty of inference and exactness
of demonstration which were possible in regard to the ideal forms of
geometry, were supposed to be also possible in regard to the conceptions
of metaphysics and ethics.[204]
The habit of making definitions, and of drawing deductions from them,
was fostered by the habit of discussion. Discussion under the name of
dialectic, which implies that it was but a regulated conversation, had
a large place, not only in the rhetorical and philosophical schools, but
also in ordinary Greek life. It was like a game of cards. The game, so
to speak, was conducted under strict and recognized rules; but it could
not proceed unless each card had a determined and admitted value. The
definition of terms was its necessary preliminary; and dialectic helped
to spread the habit of requiring definitions over a wider area and to
give it a deeper root.
There was less divergence in the definitions themselves than there was
in the propositions that were deduced from them. That is to say, there
was a verbal agreement as to definitions which was not a real agreement
of ideas: the same words were found on examination to cover different
areas of thought. But whether the difference lay in the definitions
themselves or in the deductions made from them, there was nothing to
determine which of two contrary or contradictory propositions was true.
There was no universally recognized standard of appeal, or _criterion_,
as it was termed. Indeed, the question of the nature of the criterion
was one of the chief questions at issue. Consequently, assertions about
abstract ideas and wide generalizations could only be regarded as the
affirmations of a personal conviction. The making of such an affirmation
was expressed by the same phrase which was used for a resolution of
the will—“It seems to me,” or “It seems (good) to me” (δοκεῖ μοι): the
affirmation itself, by the corresponding substantive, _dogma_ (δόγμα).
But just as the resolutions of the will of a monarch were obeyed by his
subjects, that is, were adopted as resolutions of the will of other
persons, so the affirmations of a thinker might be assented to by those
who listened to him, that is, might become affirmations of other persons.
In the one case as in the other, the same word _dogma_ was employed.[205]
It thus came to express (1) a decree, (2) a doctrine. The latter use
tended to predominate. The word came ordinarily to express an affirmation
made by a philosopher which was accepted as true by those who, from the
fact of so accepting it, became his followers and formed his school.
The acquiescence of a large number of men in the same affirmation gave
to such an affirmation a high degree of probability; but it did not
cause it to lose its original character of a personal conviction, nor
did it afford any guarantee that the coincidence of expression was also
a coincidence of ideas either between the original thinker and his
disciples, or between the disciples themselves.[206]
Within these limits of its original and proper use, and as expressing a
fact of mind, the word has an indisputable value. But the fact of the
personal character of a _dogma_ soon became lost to sight. Two tendencies
which grew with a parallel growth dominated the world in place of the
recognition of it. It came to be assumed that certain convictions of
certain philosophers were not simply true in relation to the philosophers
themselves, and to the state of knowledge in their time, but had a
universal validity: subjective and temporary convictions were thus
elevated to the rank of objective and eternal truths. It came also to
be assumed that the processes of reason so closely followed the order
of nature, that a system of ideas constructed in strict accordance with
the laws of reasoning corresponded exactly with the realities of things.
The unity of such a system reflected, it was thought, the unity of the
world of objective fact. It followed that the truth or untruth of a given
proposition was thought to be determined by its logical consistency or
inconsistency with the sum of previous inferences.
These tendencies were strongly accentuated by the decay of original
thinking. Philosophy in later Greece was less thought than literature.
It was the exegesis of received doctrines. Philosophers had become
professors. The question of what was in itself true had become entangled
with the question of what the Master had said. The moral duty of
adherence to the traditions of a school was stronger than the moral
duty of finding the truth at all hazards. The literary expression
of a doctrine came to be more important than the doctrine itself.
The differences of expression between one thinker and another were
exaggerated. Words became fetishes. Outside the schools were those who
were littérateurs rather than philosophers, and who fused different
elements together into systems which had a greater unity of literary
form than of logical coherence. But these very facts of the literary
character of philosophy, and of the contradictions in the expositions of
it, served to spread it over a wider area. They tended on the one hand to
bring a literary acquaintance with philosophy into the sphere of general
education, and on the other hand to produce a propaganda. Sect rivalled
sect in trying to win scholars for its school. The result was that the
ordinary life of later Greece was saturated with philosophical ideas, and
that the discordant theories of rival schools were blended together in
the average mind into a syncretistic dogmatism.