ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS
§ 1
The Christian gospels, broadly considered, stand for a certain
measure of freethinking reaction against the Jewish religion, and are
accordingly to be reckoned with in the present inquiry; albeit their
practical outcome was only an addition to the world's supernaturalism
and traditional dogma. To estimate aright their share of freethought,
we have but to consider the kind and degree of demand they made on the
reason of the ancient listener, as apart, that is, from the demand made
on their basis for the recognition of a new Deity. When this is done it
will be found that they express in parts a process of reflection which
outwent even critical common sense in a kind of ecstatic Stoicism,
an oriental repudiation of the tyranny of passions and appetites; in
other parts a mysticism that proceeds as far beyond the credulity of
ordinary faith. Socially considered, they embody a similar opposition
between an anarchistic and a partly orthodox or regulative ideal. The
plain inference is that they stand for many independent movements
of thought in the Græco-Roman world. It is actually on record that
the reduction of the whole law to love of one's neighbour [858] was
taught before the Christian era by the famous Rabbi Hillel; [859]
and the gospel itself [860] shows that this view was current. In
another passage [861] the reduction of the ten commandments to five
again indicates a not uncommon disregard for the ecclesiastical side
of the law. But the difference between the two passages points of
itself to various forces of relative freethought.
Any attentive study of the gospels discloses not merely much glossing
and piecing and interpolating of documents, but a plain medley
of doctrines, of ideals, of principles; and to accept the mass of
disconnected utterances ascribed to "the Lord," many of them associated
with miracles, as the oral teaching of any one man, is a proceeding
so uncritical that in no other study could it now be followed. The
simple fact that the Pauline Epistles (by whomsoever written) show
no knowledge of any Jesuine miracles or teachings whatever, except
as regards the Last Supper (1 Cor. xi, 24-25--a passage obviously
interpolated), admits of only three possible interpretations: (1)
the Jesus then believed in had not figured as a teacher at all; or
(2) the writer or writers gave no credit or attached no importance to
reports of his teachings. Either of these views (of which the first is
plainly the more plausible) admits of (3) the further conclusion that
the Pauline Jesus was not the Gospel Jesus, but an earlier one--a fair
enough hypothesis; but on that view the mass of Dominical utterances in
the gospels is only so much the less certificated. When, then, it is
admitted by all open-minded students that the events in the narrative
are in many cases fictitious, even when they are not miraculous,
it is wholly inadmissible that the sayings should be trustworthy,
as one man's teachings.
Analysing them in collation, we find even in the Synoptics, and without
taking into account the Fourth Gospel, such wide discrepancies as
the following:--
1. The doctrine: "the Kingdom of God is among you" (Lk. xvii,
21), side by side with promises of the speedy arrival of the Son
of Man, whose coming = the Kingdom of God (cp. Mt. iii, 2, 3;
iv, 17; Mk. i, 15).
2. The frequent profession to supersede the Law (Mt. v, 21, 33,
38, 43, etc.); and the express declaration that not one jot or
tittle thereof is to be superseded (Mt. v, 17-20).
3. Proclamation of a gospel for the poor and the enslaved (Lk. iv,
18); with the tacit acceptance of slavery (Lk. xvii, 7, 9, 10;
where the word translated "servant" in the A.V., and let pass
by McClellan, Blackader, and other reforming English critics,
certainly means "slave").
4. Stipulation for the simple fulfilment of the Law as a passport
to eternal life, with or without further self-denial (Mt. xix,
16-21; Lk. x, 28; xviii, 22); on the other hand a stipulation
for simple benevolence, as in the Egyptian ritual (Mt. xxv;
cp. Lk. ix, 48); and yet again stipulations for blind faith
(Mt. x, 15) and for blood redemption (Mt. xxvi, 28).
5. Alternate promise (Mt. vi, 33; xix, 29) and denial (Mt. x,
34-39) of temporal blessings.
6. Alternate commands to secrecy (Mt. xii, 16; viii, 4; ix, 30;
Mk. iii, 12; v, 43; vii, 36) and to publicity (Mt. vii, 7-8;
Mk. v, 19) concerning miracles, with a frequent record of their
public performance.
7. Specific restriction of salvation to Israelites (Mt. x, 5, 6;
xv, 24; xix, 28); equally specific declaration that the Kingdom of
God shall be to another nation (Mt. xxii, 43); no less specific
assurance that the Son of Man (not the Twelve as in Mt. xix,
28) shall judge all nations, not merely Israel (Mt. xxv, 32;
cp. viii, 11).
8. Profession to teach all, especially the simple and the childlike
(Mt. xviii, 3; xi, 25, 28-30; Mk. x, 15); on the contrary, a flat
declaration (Mt. xiii, 10-16; Mk. iv, 11; Lk. viii, 10; cp. Mk. iv,
34) that the saving teaching is only for the special disciples;
yet again (Mt. xv, 16; Mk. vi, 52; viii, 17, 18) imputations of
lack of understanding to them.
9. Companionship of the Teacher with "publicans and sinners"
(Mt. ix, 10); and, on the other hand, a reference to the publicans
as falling far short of the needed measure of loving-kindness
(Mt. v, 46).
10. Explicit contrarieties of phrase, not in context (Mt. xii,
30; Lk. xi, 50).
11. Flat contradictions of narrative as to the Teacher's local
success (Mt. xiii, 54-58; Lk. iv, 23).
12. Insistence that the Messiah is of the Davidic line (Mt. i;
xxi, 15; Lk. i, 27; ii, 4), and that he is not (Mt. xxii, 43-45;
Mk. xii, 35-37; Lk. xx).
13. Contradictory precepts as to limitation and non-limitation
of forgiveness (Mt. xviii, 17, 22).
Such variously serious discrepancies count for more than even the
chronological and other divergences of the records concerning the
Birth, the Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, as proofs
of diversity of source; and they may be multiplied indefinitely. The
only course for criticism is to admit that they stand for the ideas of
a variety of sects or movements, or else for an unlimited manipulation
of the documents by individual hands. Many of them may very well have
come from various so-called "Lords" and "Messiahs"; but they cannot
be from a single teacher.
There remains open the fascinating problem as to whether some if
not all of the more notable teachings may not be the utterances of
one teacher of commanding originality, whose sectaries were either
unable to appreciate or unable to keep separate his doctrine. [862]
Undoubtedly some of the better teachings came first from men of
superior capacity and relatively deep ethical experience. The veto
on revenge, and the inculcation of love to enemies, could not come
from commonplace minds; and the saying preserved from the Gospel
According to the Hebrews, "Unless ye cease from sacrificing the
wrath shall not cease from you," has a remarkable ring. [863] But
when we compare the precept of forgiveness with similar teachings in
the Hebrew books and the Talmud, [864] we realize that the capacity
for such thought had been shown by a number of Jewish teachers,
and that it was a specific result of the long sequence of wrong
and oppression undergone by the Jewish people at the hands of their
conquerors. The unbearable, consuming pain of an impotent hate, and
the spectacle of it in others--this experience among thoughtful men,
and not an unconditioned genius for ethic in one, is the source of a
teaching which, categorically put as it is in the gospels, misses its
meaning with most who profess to admire it; the proof being the entire
failure of most Christians in all ages to act on it. To say nothing of
similar teaching in Old Testament books and in the Talmud, we have it
in the most emphatic form in the pre-Christian "Slavonic Enoch." [865]
A superior ethic, then, stands not for one man's supernormal insight,
but for the acquired wisdom of a number of wise men. And it is now
utterly impossible to name the individual framers of the gospel
teachings, good or bad. The central biography dissolves at every
point before critical tests; it is a mythical construction. [866]
Of the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount, many are ancient; of the
parabolic and other teachings, some of the most striking occur only
in the third gospel, and are unquestionably late. And when we are
asked to recognize a unique personality behind any one doctrine, such
as the condemnation of sacrifice in the uncanonical Hebrew Gospel,
we can but answer (1) that on the face of the case this doctrine
appears to come from a separate circle; (2) that the renunciation
of sacrifice was made by many Greek and Roman writers, [867] and by
earlier teachers among the Hebrews; [868] and (3) that in the Talmud,
and in such a pre-Christian document as the "Slavonic Enoch," there
are teachings which, had they occurred in the gospels, would have been
confidently cited as unparalleled in ancient literature. The Talmudic
teachings, so vitally necessary in Jewry, that "it is better to be
persecuted than persecutor," and that, "were the persecutor a just
man and the persecuted an impious, God would still be on the side of
the persecuted," [869] are not equalled for practical purposes by any
in the Christian sacred books; and the Enochic beatitude, "Blessed
is he who looks to raise his own hand for labour," [870] is no less
remarkable. But it is impossible to associate these teachings with
any outstanding personality, or any specific movements; and to posit
a movement-making personality in the sole case of certain scattered
sayings in the gospels is critically inadmissible.
There is positively no ground for supposing that any selected set
of teachings constituted the basis or the original propaganda of
any single Christian sect, primary or secondary; and the whole known
history of the cult tells against the hypothesis that it ever centred
round those teachings which to-day specially appeal to the ethical
rationalist. Such teachings are more likely to be adventitious than
fundamental, in a cult of sacrificial salvation. When an essentially
rationalistic note is struck in the gospels, as in the insistence
[871] that a notable public catastrophe is not to be regarded in the
old Jewish manner as a punishment for sin, it is cancelled in the
next sentence by an interpolation which unintelligently reaffirms
the very doctrine denied. [872] So with the teaching [873] that the
coming worship is to be neither Judaic nor Samaritan: the next sentence
reaffirms Jewish particularism in the crudest way. The main movement,
then, was clearly superstitious.
It remains to note the so-far rationalistic character of such
teachings as the protests against ceremonialism and sabbatarianism,
the favouring of the poor and the outcast, the extension of the
future life to non-Israelites, and the express limitation of prayer
(Mt. vi, 9; Lk. xi, 2) to a simple expression of religious feeling--a
prescription which has been absolutely ignored through the whole
history of the Church, despite the constant use of the one prayer
prescribed--itself a compilation of current Jewish phrases.
The expression in the Dominical prayer translated "Give us this
day [or day by day] our daily bread" (Mt. vi, 11; Lk. xi, 3) is
pointless and tautological as it stands in the English and other
Protestant versions. In verse 8 is the assurance that the Father
knows beforehand what is needed; the prayer is, therefore, to be a
simple process of communion or advocation, free of all verbiage;
then, to make it specially ask for the necessary subsistence,
without which life would cease, and further to make the demand
each day, when in the majority of cases there would be no need
to offer such a request, is to stultify the whole. If the most
obvious necessity is to be urged, why not all the less obvious? The
Vulgate translation, "Give us to-day our super-substantial bread,"
though it has the air of providing for the Mass, is presumptively
the original sense; and is virtually supported by McClellan
(N. T. 1875, ii, 645-47), who notes that the repeated use of the
article, ton arton hêmôn ton epiousion, implies a special meaning,
and remarks that of all the suggested translations "daily" is "the
very one which is mostly manifestly and utterly condemned." Compare
the bearing of the verses Mt. vi, 25-26, 31-34, which expressly
exclude the idea of prayer for bread, and Lk. xi, 13. The idea of
a super-substantial bread seems already established in Philo, De
Legum Allegor. iii, 55-57, 59-61. Naturally the average theologian
(e.g., Bishop Lightfoot, cited by McClellan) clings to the
conception of a daily appeal to the God for physical sustenance;
but in so doing he is utterly obscuring the original doctrine.
Properly interpreted, the prayer forms a curious parallel to
the close of the tenth satire of Juvenal, above cited, where all
praying for concrete boons is condemned, on the ground that the
Gods know best, and that man is dearer to them than to himself;
but where there is permitted (of course, illogically) an appeal
for soundness of mind and spiritual serenity. The documents would
be nearly contemporary, and, though independent, would represent
kindred processes of ethical and rational improvement on current
religious practice. On the other hand, the prayer, "lead us not
into temptation, but deliver us from evil"--which again rings alien
to the context--would have been scouted by Juvenal as representing
a bad survival of the religion of fear. Several early citations
and early MSS., it should be noted, give a briefer version of the
prayer, beginning, "Father, hallowed be thy name," and dropping the
"Thy will be done" clause, as well as the "deliver us from evil,"
though including the "lead us not into temptation."
It may or may not have been that this rationalization of religion
was originally preached by the same sect or school as gave the
exalted counsel to resist not evil and to love enemies--a line of
thought found alike in India and in China, and, in the moderate
form of a veto on retaliation, in Greece and Rome. [874] But it is
inconceivable that the same sect originally laid down the doctrines
of the blood sacrifice and the final damnation of those who did
not accept the Messiah (Mt. x). The latter dogmas, with the myths,
naturally became the practical creed of the later Church, for which
the counsel of non-solicitous prayer and the love of enemies were
unimaginable ideals. [875] Equally incapable of realization by a
State Church was the anti-Pharisaical and "Bohemian" attitude ascribed
to the founder, and the spirit of independence towards the reigning
powers. For the rest, the occult doctrine that a little faith might
suffice to move mountains--a development from the mysticisms of the
Hebrew prophets--could count for nothing save as an incitement to
prayer in general. The freethinking elements in the gospels, in short,
were precisely those which historic Christianity inevitably cast aside.
§ 2
Already in the Epistles the incompatibility of the original critical
spirit with sectarian policy has become clear. Paul--if the first
epistle to the Thessalonians be his--exhorts his converts to "prove
all things, hold fast what is good"; [876] and by way of making out
the Christist case against unpliable Jews he argues copiously in his
own way; but as soon as there is a question of "another Jesus" [877]
being set up, he is the sectarian fanatic pure and simple, and he no
more thinks of applying the counsel of criticism to his dogma [878]
than of acting on his prescription of love in controversy. "Reasonings"
(logismous) are specially stigmatized: they must be "cast down." [879]
The attitude towards slavery now becomes a positive fiat in its
support; [880] and all political freethinking is superseded by a
counsel of conformity. [881] The slight touch of rationalism in the
Judaic epistle of James, where the principle of works is opposed
to that of faith, is itself quashed by an anti-rational conception
of works. [882] From a sect so taught, freethinking would tend
to disappear. It certainly obtruded itself early, for we have the
Pauline complaint [883] that "some among you say there is no rising
from the dead"; but men of that way of thinking had no clear ground
for belonging to the community, and would soon be preached out of it,
leaving only so much of the spirit of criticism as produced heresies
within the sphere of supernaturalism.
§ 3
When the new creed, spreading through the Empire, comes actively in
contact with paganism, the rationalistic principle of anti-idolatry,
still preserved by the Jewish impulse, comes into prominence; and
insofar as they criticized pagan myths and pagan image-worship,
the early Christians may be said to have rationalized. [884]
Polytheists applied the term "atheistical" alike to them [885]
and the Jews. [886] As soon as the cult was joined by lettered men,
the primitive rationalism of Evêmeros was turned by them to account;
and a series of Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius,
Lactantius, and Augustine, pressed the case against the pagan creeds
with an unflagging malice which, if exhibited by later rationalists
towards their own creed, Christians would characterize in strong
terms. But the practice of criticism towards other creeds was,
with the religious as with the philosophical sects, no help to
self-criticism. The attitude of the Christian mass towards pagan
idols and the worship of the Emperor was rather one of frenzy [887]
than of intellectual superiority; [888] and the Fathers never seem
to have found a rationalistic discipline in their polemic against
pagan beliefs. Where the unbelieving Lucian brightly banters, they
taunt and asperse, in the temper of barbarians deriding the Gods
of the enemy. None of them seems to realize the bearing against his
own creed of the pagan argument that to die and to suffer is to give
proof of non-deity. [889] In the end, the very image-worship which
had been the main ground of their rational attack on paganism became
the universal usage of their own Church; and its worship of saints
and angels, of Father, Son, and Virgin Mother, made it more truly
a polytheism than the creed of the later pagans had been. [890]
It is therefore rather to the heresies within the Church than to
its attacks on the old polytheism that we are to look for early
Christian survivals of ancient rationalism; and for the most part,
after the practically rationalistic refusal of the early Ebionites
to accept the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, [891] these heresies were
but combinations of other theosophies with the Christian.
Already in the spurious Epistles to Timothy we have allusion to the
"antitheses of the gnosis" [892] or pretended occult knowledge; and
to early Gnostic influences may be attributed those passages in the
gospel, above cited, which affirm that the Messiah's teaching is not
for the multitude but for the adepts. [893] All along, Gnosticism
[894] stood for the influence of older systems on the new faith;
an influence which among Gentiles, untrained to the cult of sacred
books, must have seemed absolutely natural. In the third century
Ammonios Saccas, of Alexandria, said to have been born of Christian
parents, set up a school which sought to blend the Christian and the
pagan systems of religion and philosophy into a pantheistic whole,
in which the old Gods figured as subordinate dæmons or as allegorical
figures, and Christ as a reformer. [895] The special leaning of the
school to Plato, whose system, already in vogue among the scholars
of Alexandria, had more affinity than any of its rivals [896] to
Christianity, secured for it adherents of many religious shades,
[897] and enabled it to develop an influence which permanently
affected Christian theology; this being the channel through which the
doctrine of the Trinity entered. According to Mosheim, almost no other
philosophy was taught at Alexandria down to the sixth century. [898]
Only when the regulative zeal of the Church had begun to draw the
lines of creed definitely [899] on anti-philosophic lines did the
syncretic school, as represented by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles,
[900] declare itself against Christianity.
Among the Church sects, as distinguished from the philosophic, the
syncretic tendency was hardly less the vogue. Some of the leading
Fathers of the second century, in particular Clement of Alexandria
and Origen, show the Platonic influence strongly, [901] and are
given, the latter in particular, to a remarkably free treatment of
the sacred books, seeing allegory wherever credence had been made
difficult by previous science, [902] or inconvenient by accepted
dogma. But in the multiplicity of Gnostic sects is to be seen the
main proof of the effort of Christians, before the complete collapse
of the ancient civilization, to think with some freedom on their
religious problems. [903] In the terms of the case--apart from the
Judaizing of the Elcesaites and Clemens Romanus--the thought is an
adaptation of pagan speculation, chiefly oriental and Egyptian; and
the commonest characteristics are: (1) in theology, an explanation of
the moral confusion of the world by assuming two opposed Powers, [904]
or by setting a variety of good and bad subordinate powers between the
world and the Supreme Being; and (2) in ethics, an insistence either
on the inherent corruptness of matter or on the incompatibility of
holiness with physical pleasure. [905] The sects influenced chiefly
from Asia teach, as a rule, a doctrine of two great opposing Powers;
those influenced from Egypt seek rather the solution of gradation
of power under one chief God. All alike showed some hostility to the
pretensions of the Jews. Thus:--
1. Saturninus of Antioch (second century) taught of a Good and
an Evil Power, and that the world and man were made by the seven
planetary spirits, without the knowledge or consent of either
Power; both of whom, however, sought to take control, the Good God
giving men rational souls, and subjecting them to seven Creators,
one of whom was the God of the Jews. Christ was a spirit sent to
bring men back to the Good God; but only their asceticism could
avail to consummate the scheme. (Irenæus, Against Heresies, i,
24; Epiphanius, Hæreses, xxiii.)
2. Similarly, Marcion (son of a bishop of Pontus) placed between
the good and bad Powers the Creator of the lower world, who was the
God and Lawgiver of the Jews, a mixed nature, but just: the other
nations being subjects of the Evil Power. Jesus, a divine spirit
sent by the Supreme God to save men, was opposed by both the God of
the Jews and the Evil Power; and asceticism is the way to carry out
his saving purpose. Of the same cast were the sects of Bardesanes
and Tatian. (Irenæus, Against Heresies, i, 27, 28; Epiphanius,
Hæreses, c. 56; Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. iv, 30. Mosheim, E. H. 2
Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 7-9. As to Marcion, see Harnack, Outlines,
ch. v; Mackay, Rise and Progress of Christianity, pt. iii, §§ 7,
12, 13; Irenæus, iv, 29, 30; Tertullian, Against Marcion.)
3. The Manichean creed (attributed to the Persian Mani or
Manichæus, third century) proceeded on the same dualistic
lines. In this the human race had been created by the Power
of Evil or Darkness, who is the God of the Jews, and hence the
body and its appetites are primordially evil, the good element
being the rational soul, which is part of the Power of Light. By
way of combining Christism and Mithraism, Christ is virtually
identified with Mithra, and Manichæus claims to be the promised
Paraclete. Ultimately the Evil Power is to be overcome, and
kept in eternal darkness, with the few lost human souls. Here
again the ethic is extremely ascetic, and there is a doctrine of
purgatory. (Milman, Hist. of Christianity, bk. iii, ch. i; Mosheim,
E. H. 3 Cent. pt. ii, ch. v, §§ 2-11; Beausobre, Hist. Critique de
Manichée et du Manichéisme, 1734; Lardner, Cred. of the Gospels,
pt. ii, ch. lxiii.)
4. Among the Egyptian Gnostics, again, Basilides taught that
the one Supreme God produced seven perfect secondary Powers,
called Æons (Ages), two of whom, Dynamis and Sophia (Power and
Wisdom), procreated superior angels, who built a heaven, and in
turn produced lower grades of angels, which produced others, till
there were 365 grades, all ruled by a Prince named Abraxas (whose
name yields the number 365). The lowest grades of angels, being
close to eternal matter (which was evil by nature), made thereof
the world and men. The Supreme God then intervened, like the Good
Power in the oriental system, to give men rational souls, but left
them to be ruled by the lower angels, of whom the Prince became God
of the Jews. All deteriorated, the God of the Jews becoming the
worst. Then the Supreme God sent the Prince of the Æons, Christ,
to save men's souls. Taking the form of the man Jesus, he was
slain by the God of the Jews. Despite charges to the contrary,
this system too was ascetic, though lenient to paganism. Similar
tenets were held by the sects of Carpocrates and Valentinus, all
rising in the second century; Valentinus setting up Thirty Æons,
male and female, in pairs, with four unmarried males, guardians
of the Pleroma or Heaven--namely, Horus, Christ, the Holy Spirit,
and Jesus. The youngest Æon, Sophia, brought forth a daughter,
Achamoth (Scientia), who made the world out of rude matter,
and produced Demiourgos, the Artificer, who further manipulated
matter. (Irenæus, bk. i, chs. 24, 25; bk. ii.)
These sects in turn split into others, with endless peculiarities.
Such was the relative freethought of credulous theosophic fantasy,
[906] turning fictitious data to fresh purpose by way of solving
the riddle of the painful earth. The problem was to account for evil
consistently with a Good God; and the orientals, inheriting a dualistic
religion, adapted that; while the Egyptians, inheriting a syncretic
monotheism, set up grades of Powers between the All-Ruler and men,
on the model of the grades between the Autocrat, ancient or modern,
and his subjects. The Manichæans, the most thoroughly organized of
all the outside sects, appear to have absorbed many of the adherents
of the great Mithraic religion, and held together for centuries,
despite fierce persecution and hostile propaganda, their influence
subsisting till the Middle Ages. [907] The other Gnosticisms fared
much worse. Lacking sacred books, often setting up a severe ethic
as against the frequently loose practice of the churches, [908] and
offering a creed unsuited to the general populace, all alike passed
away before the competition of the organized Church, which founded
on the Canon [909] and the concrete dogmas, with many pagan rites
and beliefs [910] and a few great pagan abracadabras added.
§ 4
More persistently dangerous to the ancient Church were the successive
efforts of the struggling spirit of reason within to rectify in some
small measure its most arbitrary dogmas. Of these efforts the most
prominent were the quasi-Unitarian doctrine of Arius (fourth century),
and the opposition by Pelagius and his pupil Cælestius (early in fifth
century) to the doctrine of hereditary sin and predestinate salvation
or damnation--a Judaic conception dating in the Church from Tertullian,
and unknown to the Greeks. [911]
The former was the central and one of the most intelligible conflicts
in the vast medley of early discussion over the nature of the Person
of the Founder--a theme susceptible of any conceivable formula, when
once the principle of deification was adopted. Between the Gnosticism
of Athenagoras, which made the Logos the direct manifestation of
Deity, and the Judaic view that Jesus was "a mere man," for stating
which the Byzantine currier Theodotos was excommunicated at Rome
by Bishop Victor [912] in the third century, there were a hundred
possible fantasies of discrimination; [913] and the record of them
is a standing revelation of the intellectual delirium in the ancient
Church. Theodotos the currier is said to have made disciples [914]
who induced one Natalius to become "a bishop of this heresy"; and
his doctrine was repeatedly revived, notably by Artemon. According
to a trinitarian opponent, they were much given to science, in
particular to geometry and medicine. [915] But such an approach to
rationalism could not prosper in the atmosphere in which Christianity
arose. Arianism itself, when put on its defence, pronounced Jesus to
be God, after beginning by declaring him to be merely the noblest of
created beings, and thus became merely a modified mysticism, fighting
for the conception homoiousios (of similar nature) as against that of
homoousios (of the same nature). [916] Even at that, the sect split up,
its chief dissenters ranking as semi-Arians, and many of the latter
at length drifting back to Nicene orthodoxy. [917] At first strong in
the east, where it persecuted when it could, it was finally suppressed,
after endless strifes, by Theodosius at the end of the fourth century;
only to reappear in the west as the creed of the invading Goths and
Lombards. In the east it had stood for ancient monotheism; in the
west it prospered by early missionary and military chance till the
Papal organization triumphed. [918] Its suppression meant the final
repudiation of rationalism; though it had for the most part subsisted
as a fanaticism, no less than did the Nicene creed.
More philosophical, and therefore less widespread, was the doctrine
associated in the second century with the name of Praxeas, in
the third with those of Sabellius and Paul of Samosata, and in the
fourth with that of Photinus. Of this the essence was the conception
of the triune deity as being not three persons but three modes or
aspects of one person--a theorem welcomed in the later world by such
different types of believer as Servetus, Hegel, and Coleridge. Far
too reasonable for the average believer, and far too unpropitious to
ritual and sacraments for the average priest, it was always condemned
by the majority, though it had many adherents in the east, until the
establishment of the Church made Christian persecution a far more
effective process than pagan persecution had ever been.
Pelagianism, which unlike Arianism was not an ecclesiastical but a
purely theological division, [919] fared better, the problem at issue
involving the permanent crux of religious ethics. Augustine, whose
supreme talent was for the getting up of a play of dialectic against
every troublesome movement in turn, without regard to his previous
positions, [920] undertook to confute Pelagius and Cælestius as he
did every other innovator; and his influence was such that, after
they had been acquitted of heresy by a church council in Palestine
and by the Roman pontiff, the latter was induced to change his ground
and condemn them, whereupon many councils followed suit, eighteen
Pelagian bishops being deposed in Italy. At that period Christendom,
faced by the portent of the barbarian conquest of the Empire, was
well adjusted to a fatalistic theology, and too uncritical in its
mood to realize the bearing of such doctrine either on conduct or on
sacerdotal pretensions. But though the movement in its first form was
thus crushed, and though in later forms it fell considerably short of
the measure of ethical rationalism seen in the first, it soon took
fresh shape in the form of so-called semi-Pelagianism, and so held
its ground while any culture subsisted; [921] while Pelagianism on the
theme of the needlessness of "prevenient grace," and the power of man
to secure salvation of his own will, has been chronic in the Church.
For a concise view of the Pelagian tenets see Murdock's note
on Mosheim, following Walch and Schlegel (Reid's edition,
pp. 208-209). They included (1) denial that Adam's sin was
inherited; (2) assertion that death is strictly natural, and not
a mere punishment for Adam's sin; (3) denial that children and
virtuous adults dying unbaptized are damned, a middle state being
provided for them; (4) assertion that good acts come of a good
will, and that the will is free; grace being an enlightenment of
the understanding, and not indispensable to all men. The relative
rationalism of these views is presumptively to be traced to
the facts that Pelagius was a Briton and Cælestius an Irishman,
and that both were Greek scholars. (When tried in Palestine they
spoke Greek, like the council, but the accuser could speak only
Latin.) They were thus bred in an atmosphere not yet laden with
Latin dogma. In "confuting" them Augustine developed the doctrine
(intelligible as that of an elderly polemist in a decadent society)
that all men are predestined to salvation or damnation by God's
"mere good pleasure"--a demoralizing formula which he at times
hedged with illogical qualifications. (Cp. Murdock's note on
Mosheim, as cited, p. 210; Gieseler, § 87.) But an orthodox
champion of Augustine describes him as putting the doctrine without
limitations (Rev. W. R. Clarke, St. Augustine, in "The Fathers
for English Readers" series, p. 132). It was never adopted in the
east (Gieseler, p. 387), but became part of Christian theology,
especially under Protestantism. On the other hand, the Council of
Trent erected several Pelagian doctrines into articles of faith;
and the Protestant churches have in part since followed. See Sir
W. Hamilton's Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, 1852,
pp. 493-94, note; and Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, i,
142, 149.
The Latin Church thus finally maintained in religion the tradition
of sworn adherence to sectarian formulas which has been already noted
in the Roman philosophic sects, and in so doing reduced to a minimum
the exercise of the reason, alike in ethics and in philosophy. Its
dogmatic code was shaped under the influence of (1) Irenæus and
Tertullian, who set scripture above reason and, when pressed by
heretics, tradition above even scripture, [922] and (2) Augustine,
who had the same tendencies, and whose incessant energy secured him
a large influence. That influence was used not only to dogmatize
every possible item of the faith, but to enforce in religion another
Roman tradition, formerly confined to politics--that of systematic
coercion of heretics. Before and around Augustine there had indeed been
abundant mutual persecution of the bitterest kind between the parties
of the Church as well as against pagans; the Donatists, in particular,
with their organization of armed fanatics, the Circumcelliones, had
inflicted and suffered at intervals all the worst horrors of civil
war in Africa during a hundred years; Arians and Athanasians came
again and again to mutual bloodshed; and the slaying of the pagan
girl-philosopher, Hypatia, [923] by the Christian monks of Alexandria
is one of the vilest episodes in the whole history of religion. On
the whole, it is past question that the amount of homicide wrought by
all the pagan persecution of the earlier Christians was not a tithe of
that wrought by their successors in their own quarrels. But the spirit
which had so operated, and which had been repudiated even by the bitter
Tertullian, was raised by Augustine to the status of a Christian dogma,
[924] which, of course, had sufficient support in the sacred books,
Judaic and Jesuist, and which henceforth inspired such an amount of
murderous persecution in Christendom as the ancient world had never
seen. When, the temple revenues having been already confiscated, the
pagan worships were finally overthrown and the temples appropriated
by the edict of Honorius in the year 408, Augustine, "though not
entirely consistent, disapproved of the forcible demolition of
the temples." [925] But he had nothing to say against the forcible
suppression of their worship, and of the festivals. Ambrose went
as far; [926] and such men as Firmicus Maternus would have had the
emperors go much further. [927]
Economic interest had now visibly become at least as potent in the
shaping of the Christian course as it had ever been in building up a
pagan cult. For the humble conditions in which the earlier priests
and preachers had gained a livelihood by ministering to scattered
groups of poor proselytes, there had been substituted those of a State
Church, adopted as such because its acquired range of organization
had made it a force fit for the autocrat's purposes when others had
failed. The sequent situation was more and more unfavourable to both
sincerity of thought and freedom of speech. Not only did thousands
of wealth-seekers promptly enter the priesthood to profit by the
new endowments allotted by Constantine to the great metropolitan
churches. Almost as promptly the ideal of toleration was renounced;
and the Christians began against the pagans a species of persecution
that proceeded on no higher motive than greed of gain. Not only were
the revenues of the temples confiscated as we have seen, but a number
of Christians took to the business of plundering pagans in the name
of the laws of Constantius forbidding sacrifice, and confiscating the
property of the temples. Libanius, in his Oration for the Temples [928]
(390), addressed to Theodosius, circumstantially avers that the bands
of monks and others who went about demolishing and plundering temples
were also wont to rob the peasants, adding:--
They also seize the lands of some, saying "it is sacred"; and
many are deprived of their paternal inheritance upon a false
pretence. Thus those men thrive upon other people's ruin who say
"they worship God with fasting." And if they who are wronged
come to the pastor in the city ... he commends (the robbers)
and rejects the others.... Moreover, if they hear of any land
which has anything that can be plundered, they cry presently,
"Such an one sacrificeth, and does abominable things, and
a troop ought to be sent against him." And presently the
self-styled reformers (sôphronistai) are there.... Some of these
... deny their proceedings.... Others glory and boast and tell
their exploits.... But they say, "We have only punished those
who sacrifice and thereby transgress the law which forbids
sacrifice." O emperor, when they say this, they lie.... Can
it be thought that they who are not able to bear the sight of a
collector's cloak should despise the power of your government?... I
appeal to the guardians of the law [to confirm the denial]. [929]
The whole testimony is explicit and weighty, [930] and, being
corroborated by Ammianus Marcellinus, is accepted by clerical
historians. [931] Ammianus declares that some of the courtiers of
the Christian emperors before Julian were "glutted with the spoils
of the temples." [932]
The official creed, with its principle of rigid uniformity and
compulsion, is now recognizable as the only expedient by which
the Church could be held together for its economic ends. Under the
Eastern Empire, accordingly, when once a balance of creed was attained
in the Church, the same coercive ideal was enforced, with whatever
differences in the creed insisted on. Whichever phase of dogma was in
power, persecution of opponents went on as a matter of course. [933]
Athanasians and Arians, Nestorians and Monophysites, used the same
weapons to the utmost of their scope; Cyril of Alexandria led his
fanatics to the pillage and expulsion of the Jews, as his underling
Peter led them to the murder of Hypatia; other bishops wrought the
destruction of temples throughout Egypt; [934] Theodosius, Marcian,
St. Leo, Zeno, Justinian, all used coercion against every heresy
without a scruple, affirming every verbal fantasy of dogma at the
point of the sword. It was due to no survival of the love of reason
that some of the more stubborn heresies, driven into communion with
the new civilization of the Arabs, were the means of carrying some
of the seeds of ancient thought down the ages, to fructify ultimately
in the mental soil of modern Europe.
§ 5
Against the orthodox creed, apart from social and official hostility,
there had early arisen critics who reasoned in terms of Jewish and
pagan beliefs, and in terms of such rationalism as survived. Of the two
former sorts some remains have been preserved, despite the tendency of
the Church to destroy their works. Of the latter, apart from Lucian,
we have traces in the Fathers and in the Neo-Platonists.
Thus Tertullian and Lactantius tell of the many who believe in a
non-active and passionless God, [935] and disdain those who turn
Christian out of fear of a hereafter; and again [936] of Stoics
who deride the belief in demons. A third-century author quoted by
Eusebius [937] speaks of apistoi who deny the divine authorship
of the holy scriptures, in such a fashion as to imply that this was
done by some who were not merely pagan non-Christians but deniers of
inspiration. Jamblichos, too, [938] speaks of opponents of the worship
of the Gods in his day (early in the fourth century). [939] In the
fifth century, again, Augustine complains bitterly of those impious
and reckless persons who dare to say that the evangelists differ among
themselves. [940] He argues no less bitterly against the increduli and
infideles who would not believe in immortality and the possibility of
eternal torment; [941] and he meets them in a fashion which constantly
recurs in Christian apologetics, pointing to natural anomalies, real
or alleged, and concluding that since we cannot understand all we see
we should believe all we hear--from the Church. Those who derided the
story of Jonah and the whale he meets by accusing them of believing
the story of Arion and the dolphin. [942] In the same way he meets
[943] their protest against the iniquity of eternal punishment by a
juggle over the ostensible anomaly of long punishments by human law
for short misdeeds. Whatever may have been his indirect value of his
habit of dialectic, he again and again declares for prone faith and
against the resort to reason; and to this effect may be cited a long
series of Fathers and ecclesiastics, all eager to show that only in
a blind faith could there be any moral merit. [944]
Such arguments were doubtless potent to stupefy what remained of
critical faculty in the Roman world. In the same period Salvian makes
a polemic against those who in Christian Gaul denied that God exercised
any government on earth. [945] They seem, however, to have been normal
Christians, driven to this view by the barbarian invasions. Fronto,
the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, again, seems to have attacked the
Christians partly as rationalist, partly as conservative. [946]
In general, the orthodox polemic is interesting only insofar as
it preserves that of the opposition. The Dialogue with Trypho by
Justin Martyr (about 150) is a mere documental discussion between a
Christian and a Jew, each founding on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the
Christian doing nearly all of the argument. There is not a scintilla
of independent rationalism in the whole tedious work. [947] Justin
was a type of the would-be "philosopher" who confessedly would take
no trouble to study science or philosophize, but who found his sphere
in an endless manipulation of the texts of sacred books. But the work
of the learned Origen Against Celsus preserves for us a large part of
the True Discourse of Celsus, a critical and extremely well-informed
argument against Christianity by a pagan of the Platonic [948] school
in the time of Marcus Aurelius, [949] on grounds to a considerable
extent rationalistic. [950] The line of rejoinder followed by Origen,
one of the most cultured of the Christian Fathers, is for the most
part otherwise. When Celsus argues that it makes no difference by what
name the Deity is called, Origen answers [951] that on the contrary
certain God-names have a miraculous or magical virtue for the casting
out of evil spirits; that this mystery is known and practised by
the Egyptians and Persians; and that the mere name of Jesus has been
proved potent to cast out many such demons. When, on the other hand,
Celsus makes a Jew argue against the Christist creed on the basis
of the Jewish story that the founder's birth was illegitimate, [952]
the Father's answer begins in sheer amiable ineptitude, [953] which
soon passes into shocked outcry. [954] In other passages he is more
successful, as when he convicts Celsus's Jew of arguing alternately
that the disciples were deceived, and that they were deceivers. [955]
This part of the discussion is interesting chiefly as showing how
educated Jews combated the gospels in detail, at a level of criticism
not always above that of the believers. Sometimes the Jew's case is
shrewdly put, as when he asks, [956] "Did Jesus come into the world
for this purpose, that we should not believe him?"--a challenge not to
be met by Origen's theology. One of the acutest of Celsus's thrusts
is the remark that Jesus himself declared that miracles would be
wrought after him by followers of Satan, and that the argument from
miracles is thus worthless. [957] To this the rejoinder of Origen
is suicidal; but at times the assailant, himself a believer in all
manner of miracles, gives away his advantage completely enough.
Of a deeper interest are the sections in which Celsus (himself a
believer in a Supreme Deity and a future state, and in a multitude of
lower Powers, open to invocation) rests his case on grounds of general
reason, arguing that the true Son of God must needs have brought home
his mission to all mankind; [958] and sweeps aside as foolish the
whole dispute between Jews and Christians, [959] of which he had given
a sample. Most interesting of all are the chapters [960] in which
the Christian cites the pagan's argument against the homo-centric
theory of things. Celsus insists on the large impartiality of Nature,
and repudiates the fantasy that the whole scheme is adjusted to the
well-being and the salvation of man. Here the Christian, standing for
his faith, may be said to carry on, though in the spirit of a new
fanaticism, the anti-scientific humanism first set up by Sokrates;
while the pagan, though touched by religious apriorism, and prone to
lapse from logic to mysticism in his turn, approaches the scientific
standpoint of the elder thinkers who had set religion aside. [961]
Not for thirteen hundred years was his standpoint to be regained among
men. His protest against the Christian cultivation of blind faith,
[962] which Origen tries to meet on rationalistic lines, would in
a later age be regarded as conveying no imputation. Even the simple
defensive subtleties of Origen are too rationalistic for the succeeding
generations of the orthodox. The least embittered of the Fathers,
he is in his way the most reasonable; and in his unhesitating resort
to the principle of allegory, wherever his documents are too hard
for belief, we see the last traces of the spirit of reason as it
had been in Plato, not yet paralysed by faith. Henceforth, till a
new intellectual life is set up from without, Christian thought is
more and more a mere disputation over the unintelligible, in terms
of documents open always to opposing constructions.
Against such minds the strictest reason would be powerless; and it
was fitting enough that Lucian, the last of the great freethinkers of
the Hellenistic world, should merely turn on popular Christianity
some of his serene satire [963]--more, perhaps, than has come
down to us; though, on the other hand, his authorship of the De
Morte Peregrini, which speaks of the "crucified sophist," has been
called in question. [964] The forcible-feeble dialogue Philopatris,
falsely attributed to Lucian, and clearly belonging to the reign of
Julian, is the last expression of general skepticism in the ancient
literature. The writer, a bad imitator of Lucian, avows disbelief
alike in the old Gods and in the new, and professes to respect,
if any, the "Unknown God" of the Athenians; but he makes no great
impression of intellectual sincerity. Apart from this, and the lost
anti-Christian work [965] of Hierocles, Governor of Bithynia under
Diocletian, the last direct literary opponents of ancient Christianity
were Porphyry and Julian. As both were believers in many Gods, and
opposed Christianity because it opposed these, neither can well
rank on that score as a freethinker, even in the sense in which
the speculative Gnostics were so. The bias of both, like that of
Plutarch, seems to have been to the utmost latitude of religious
belief; and, apart from personal provocations and the ordinary temper
of religious conservatism, it was the exiguity of the Christian creed
that repelled them. Porphyry's treatise, indeed, was answered by four
Fathers, [966] all of whose replies have disappeared, doubtless in
fulfilment of the imperial edict for the destruction of Porphyry's
book--a dramatic testimony to the state of mental freedom under
Theodosius II. [967] What is known of his argument is preserved in the
incidental replies of Jerome, Augustine, Eusebius, and others. [968]
The answer of Cyril to Julian has survived, probably in virtue of
Julian's status. His argumentations against the unworthy elements, the
exclusiveness, and the absurdities of the Jewish and Christian faith
are often reasonable enough, as doubtless were those of Porphyry;
[969] but his own theosophic positions are hardly less vulnerable;
and Porphyry's were probably no better, to judge from his preserved
works. Yet it is to be said that the habitual tone and temper of the
two men compares favourably with that of the polemists on the other
side. They had inherited something of the elder philosophic spirit,
which is so far to seek in patristic literature, outside of Origen.
The latest expressions of rationalism among churchmen were to the
full as angrily met by the champions of orthodoxy as the attacks of
enemies; and, indeed, there was naturally something of bitterness
in the resistance of the last few critical spirits in the Church to
the fast-multiplying insanities of faith. Thus, at the end of the
fourth century, the Italian monk Jovinian fought against the creed
of celibacy and asceticism, and was duly denounced, vituperated,
ecclesiastically condemned, and banished, penal laws being at the
same time passed against those who adhered to him. [970] Contemporary
with him was the Eastern Aerius, who advocated priestly equality as
against episcopacy, and objected to prayers for the dead, to fasts,
and to the too significant practice of slaying a lamb at the Easter
festival. [971] In this case matters went the length of schism. With
less of practical effect, in the next century, Vigilantius of Aquitaine
made a more general resistance to a more manifold superstition,
condemning and ridiculing the veneration of tombs and bones of martyrs,
pilgrimages to shrines, the miracle stories therewith connected, and
the practices of fasting, celibacy, and the monastic life. He too
was promptly put down, largely by the efforts of his former friend
Jerome, the most voluble and the most scurrilous pietist of his age,
who had also denounced the doctrine of Jovinian. [972] For centuries
no such appeal was heard in the western Church.
The spirit of reason, however, is well marked at the beginning of
the fifth century in a pagan writer who belongs more truly to the
history of freethought than either Julian or Porphyry. Macrobius, a
Roman patrician of the days of Honorius, works out in his Saturnalia,
with an amount of knowledge and intelligence which for the time is
remarkable, the principle that all the Gods are but personifications
of aspects or functions of the Sun. But such doctrine must have been
confined, among pagans, to the cultured few; and the monotheism of
the same writer's treatise On the Dream of Scipio was probably not
general even among the remaining pagans of the upper class. [973]
After Julian, open rationalism being already extinct, anti-Christian
thought was simply tabooed; and though the leading historians for
centuries were pagans, they only incidentally venture to betray the
fact. It is told, indeed, that in the days of Valens and Valentinian
an eminent physician named Posidonius, son of a great physician and
brother of another, was wont to say, "that men do not grow fanatic by
the agency of evil spirits, but merely by the superfluity of certain
evil humours; and that there is no power in evil spirits to assail the
human race"; [974] but though that opinion may be presumed to have
been held by some other physicians, the special ascription of it to
Posidonius is a proof that it was rarely avowed. With public lecturing
forbidden, with the philosophic schools at Athens closed and plundered
by imperial force, [975] with heresy ostracized, with pagan worship,
including the strong rival cult of Mithraism, outwardly suppressed by
the same power, [976] unbelief was naturally little heard of after the
fifth century. About its beginning we find Chrysostom boasting [977]
that the works of the anti-Christian writers had persuaded nobody,
and had almost disappeared. As regarded open teaching, it was only too
true, though the statement clashes with Chrysostom's own complaint that
Porphyry had led many away from the faith. [978] Proclus was still to
come (410-485), with his eighteen Arguments against the Christians,
proceeding on the principle, still cherished from the old science,
that the world was eternal. But such teaching could not reach even
the majority of the more educated; and the Jewish dogma of creation
ex nihilo became sacrosanct truth for the darkening world. In the
east Eusebius, [979] and in the west Lactantius, [980] expressed for
the whole Church a boundless contempt of everything in the nature of
scientific research or discussion; and it was in fact at an end for
the Christian world for well-nigh a thousand years. For Lactantius,
the doctrine of a round earth and an antipodes was mere nonsense;
he discusses the thesis with the horse-laughter of a self-satisfied
savage. [981] Under the feet of arrogant and blatant ignorance we
see trampled the first form of the doctrine of gravitation, not to be
recovered for an æon. Proclus himself cherished some of the grossest
pagan superstitions; and the few Christians who had in them something
of the spirit of reason, as Cosmas "Indicopleustes," "the Indian
navigator," who belongs to the sixth century, were turned away from
what light they had by their sacred books. Cosmas was a Nestorian,
denying the divinity of Mary, and a rational critic as regards the
orthodox fashion of applying Old Testament prophecies to Jesus. [982]
But whereas pagan science had inferred that the earth is a sphere,
his Bible taught him that it is an oblong plain; and the great aim
of his Topographia Christiana, sive Christianorum opinio de mundo,
was to prove this against those who still cultivated science.
Such pleadings were not necessary for the general Christian public,
who knew nothing save what their priests taught them. In Chrysostom's
day this was already the case. There remained but a few rational
heresies. One of the most notable was that of Theodore of Mopsuestia,
the head of the school of Antioch and the teacher of Nestorius, who
taught that many of the Old Testament prophecies commonly applied
to Jesus had reference to pre-Christian events, and discriminated
critically among the sacred books. That of Job he pronounced to be
merely a poem derived from a pagan source, and the Song of Songs he
held to be a mere epithalamium of no religious significance. In his
opinion Solomon had the logos gnôseôs the love of knowledge, but not
the logos sophias the love of wisdom. [983] No less remarkable was
the heresy of Photinus, who taught that the Trinity was a matter not of
persons, but of modes of deity. [984] Such thinking must be pronounced
the high-water mark of rational criticism in the ancient Church; and
its occurrence in an age of rapid decay is memorable enough. But in
the nature of things it could meet with only the scantiest support;
and the only critical heresy which bulked at all largely was that of
the Unitarian Anomoeans or Eunomians, [985] who condemned the worship
of relics, [986] and made light of scriptural inspiration when texts,
especially from the Old Testament, were quoted against them. [987]
Naturally Chrysostom himself denounced them as unbelievers. Save
for these manifestations, the spirit of sane criticism had gone from
the Christian world, with science, with art, with philosophy, with
culture. But the verdict of time is given in the persistent recoil
of the modern spirit from the literature of the age of faith to that
of the elder age of nascent reason; and the historical outcome of the
state of things in which Chrysostom rejoiced was the re-establishment
of universal idolatry and practical polytheism in the name of the
creed he had preached. Every species of superstition known to paganism
subsisted, slightly transformed. While the emperors savagely punished
the pagan soothsayers, the Christians held by the same fundamental
delusion; and against the devices of pagan magic, in the reality
of which they unquestioningly believed, they professed triumphantly
to practise their own sorceries of holy water, relics, prayer, and
exorcism, no man daring to impugn the insanities of faith. [988]
On the face of religious life, critical reason was extinct.
§ 6
It might safely have been inferred, but it is a matter of proved fact,
that while the higher intellectual life was thus being paralysed,
the primary intellectual virtues were attained. As formerly in Jewry,
so now in Christendom, the practice of pious fraud became normal: all
early Christian literature, and most of the ecclesiastical history of
many succeeding centuries, is profoundly compromised by the habitual
resort to fiction, forgery, and interpolation. The mystical poetry
of the pagans, the Jewish history of Josephus, the gospels, the
Epistles, all were interpolated in the same spirit as had inspired
the production of new Gospels, new Epistles, new books of Acts, new
Sibylline verses. And even where to this tendency there was opposed
the growing demand of the organized Church for a faithful text, when
the documents had become comparatively ancient, the disposition to
invent and suppress, to reason crookedly, to delude and mislead, was
normal among churchmen. This is the verdict of orthodox ecclesiastical
history, a dozen times repeated. [989] It of course carries no surprise
for those who have noted the religious doctrine of Plato, of Polybius,
of Cicero, of Varro, of Strabo, of Dio Cassius.
While intelligence thus retrograded under the reign of faith, it
is impossible to maintain, in the name of historical science, the
conventional claim that the faith wrought a countervailing good. What
moral betterment there was in the decaying Roman world was a matter
of the transformed social conditions, and belongs at least as much
to paganism as to Christianity: even the asceticism of the latter,
which in reality had no reformative virtue for society at large,
was a pre-Christian as well as an anti-Christian phenomenon. It
is indeed probable that in the times of persecution the Christian
community would be limited to the more serious and devoted types
[990]--that is to say, to those who would tend to live worthily under
any creed. But that the normal Christian community was superior in
point of morals is a poetic hallucination, set up by the legends
concerning the martyrs and by the vauntings of the Fathers, which
are demonstrably untrustworthy. The assertion, still at times made
by professed Positivists, that the discredit of the marriage tie in
Roman life necessitated a new religion, and that the new religion
was regenerative, is only a quasi-scientific variation of the legend.
The evidence as to the failure of the faith to reform its adherents
is continuous from the first generation onwards. "Paul" complains
bitterly of the sexual licence among his first Corinthian converts
(1 Cor. v, 1, 2), and seeks to check it by vehement commands, some
mystical (id. v. 5), some prescribing ostracism (vv. 9-13)--a
plain confession of failure, and a complete reversal of the
prescription in the gospel (Mt. xviii, 22). If that could be
set aside, the command as to divorce could be likewise. Justin
Martyr (Dial. with Trypho, ch. 141) describes the orthodox Jews
of his day as of all men the most given to polygamy and arbitrary
divorce. (Cp. Deut. xxiv, 1; Edersheim, History, p. 294.) Then
the Christian assumption as to Roman degeneration and Eastern
virtue cannot be sustained.
At the beginning of the third century we have the decisive
evidence of Tertullian that many of the charges of immorality
made by serious pagans against Christians were in large part
true. First he affirms (Ad Nationes, l. i, c. 5) that the pagan
charges are not true of all, "not even of the greatest part
of us." In regard to the charge of incest (c. 16), instead of
denying it as the earlier apologist Minucius Felix had done in
the age of persecution, he merely argues that the same offence
occurs through ignorance among the pagans. The chapter concludes
by virtually admitting the charge with regard to misconduct in
"the mysteries." Still later, when he has turned Montanist,
Tertullian explicitly charges his former associates with sexual
licence (De Jejuniis, cc. 1, 17: De Virginibus Velandis, c. 14),
pointing now to the heathen as showing more regard for monogamy
than do the Christians (De Exhort. Castitatis, c. 13).
From the fourth century onward the history of the Church reveals
at every step a conformity on the part of its members to average
pagan practice. The third canon of the Nicene Council forbids
clerics of all ranks from keeping as companions or housekeepers
women who are not their close blood relations. In the fifth
century Salvian denounces the Christians alike of Gaul and Africa
as being boundlessly licentious in comparison with the Arian
barbarians (De Gubernatione Dei, lib. 5, 6, 7). They do not even,
he declares, deny the charge, contenting themselves with claiming
superior orthodoxy. (Cp. Bury, Hist. of the Later Roman Empire,
i, 198-99, and Finlay, ii, 219, for another point of view.) On
all hands heresy was reckoned the one deadly sin (Gieseler, § 74,
p. 295, and refs.), and all real misdeeds came to seem venial by
comparison. As to sexual vice and crime among the Christianized
Germans, see Gieseler, § 125, vol. ii, 158-60.
In the East the conditions were the same. The story of the
indecent performances of Theodora on the stage (Gibbon, ch. xl),
probably untrue of her, implies that such practices openly
occurred. Milman (Hist. of Chr. bk. iv, ch. ii. ed. cited, ii,
327) recognizes general indecency, and notes that Zosimus charged
it on Christian rule. Salvian speaks of unlimited obscenity in the
theatres of Christian Gaul (De Gub. Dei, l. 6). Cp. Gibbon as to
the character of the devout Justinian's minister Trebonian; who,
however, was called an atheist. (Suidas, s.v.) On the collapse
of the iconoclastic movement, licence became general (Finlay,
Hist. of Greece, ed. Tozer, ii, 162). But even in the fourth
century Chrysostom's writings testify to the normality of all the
vices, as well as the superstitions, that Christianity is supposed
to have banished; the churches figuring, like the ancient temples,
as places of assignation. (Cp. the extracts of Lavollée, Les
Moeurs Byzantines, in Essais de littérature et d'histoire, 1891,
pp. 48-62, 89; the S.P.C.K.'s St. Chrysostom's Picture of his Age,
1875, pp. 6, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102-104, 108, 194; Chrysostom's
Homilies, Eng. tr. 1839, Hom. xii on 1st Cor. pp. 159-64;
Jerome, Adv. Vigilantium, cited by Gieseler, ii, 66, note 19,
and in Gilly's Vigilantius and his Times, 1844, pp. 406-407.) The
clergy were among the most licentious of all, and Chrysostom had
repeatedly to preach against them (Lavollée, ch. iv; Mosheim, as
last cited; Gibbon, ch. xlvii, Bohn ed. iv, 232). The position of
women was practically what it had been in post-Alexandrian Greece
and Asia-Minor (Lavollée, ch. v; cp. St. Chrysostom's Picture of
his Age, pp. 180-82); and the practice corresponded. In short,
the supposition that the population of Constantinople as we see
it under Justinian, or that of Alexandria in the same age, could
have been morally austere, is fantastic.
It would indeed be unintelligible that intellectual decline without
change of social system should put morals on a sound footing. The
very asceticism which seeks to mortify the body is an avowal of the
vice from which it recoils, and insofar as this has prevailed under
Christianity it has specifically hindered general temperance, [991]
inasmuch as the types capable of self-rule thus leave no offspring.
On the other hand, with the single exception of the case of the
gladiatorial combats (which had been denounced in the first century
by the pagan Seneca, [992] and in the fourth by the pagan Libanius,
but lasted in Rome long after Christianity had become the State
religion; [993] while the no less cruel combats of men with wild
beasts were suppressed only when the finances of the falling Empire
could no longer maintain them), [994] the vice of cruelty seems to
have been in no serious degree cast out. [995] Cruelty to slaves was
certainly not less than in the Rome of the Antonines; and Chrysostom
[996] denounces just such atrocities by cruel mistresses as had been
described by Horace and Juvenal. The story of the slaying of Hypatia,
indeed, is decisive as to Christian ferocity. [997]
In fine, the entire history of Christian Egypt, Asia, and Africa,
progressively decadent till their easy conquest by the Saracens,
and the entire history of the Christian Byzantine empire, at best
stagnant in mental and material life during the thousand years of its
existence, serve conclusively to establish the principle that in the
absence of freethought no civilization can progress. More completely
than any of the ancient civilizations to which they succeeded, they
cast out or were denuded of the spirit of free reason. The result was
strictly congruous. The process, of course, was one of socio-political
causation throughout; and the rule of dogma was a symptom or effect of
the process, not the extraneous cause. But that is only the clinching
of the sociological lesson.
Of a deep significance, in view of the total historical movement,
is the philosophical teaching of the last member of the ancient Roman
world who exhibited philosophical capacity--the long famous Boethius,
minister of the conqueror Theodoric, who put him to death in the
year 525. Ostensibly from the same hand we have the De Consolatione
Philosophiae, which is substantially non-Christian, and a number
of treatises expounding orthodox Christian dogma. In the former
"we find him in strenuous opposition ... to the Christian theory of
creation; and his Dualism is at least as apparent as Plato's. We find
him coquetting with the anti-Christian doctrine of the immortality
of the world, and assuming a position with regard to sin which is
ultra-Pelagian and utterly untenable by a Christian theologian. We
find him, with death before his eyes, deriving consolation not from
any hopes of a resurrection ... but from the present contempt of all
earthly pain and ill which his divine mistress, 'the perfect solace
of wearied souls,' has taught him." [998] Seeing that Theodoric,
though a professed admirer of the ancient life, had absolutely put
down, on pain of death, [999] every remaining religious practice of
paganism, it is certain that Boethius must have officially professed
Christianity; but his book seems to make it certain that he was
not a believer. The only theory on which the expounder of such an
essentially pagan philosophy can be conceived as really the author
of the Christian tractates ascribed to Boethius is that, under the
stroke of undeserved ruin and unjust doom, the thinker turned away
from the creed of his official life and sought healing in the wisdom
of the older world. [1000] Whether we accept this solution or, in
despite of the specific testimony, reject the theological tractates as
falsely ascribed--either by their writer or by others--to Boethius,
[1001] the significant fact remains that it was not the Christian
tracts but the pagan Consolation that passed down to the western
nations of the Middle Ages as the last great intellectual legacy from
the ancient world. It had its virtue for an age of mental bondage,
because it preserved some pulse of the spirit of free thought.