AELIAN, SOLINUS AND HORAPOLLO
Aelian _On the Nature of Animals_—General character of the work—Its
hodge-podge of unclassified detail—Solinus in the middle ages—His
date—General character of his work; its relation to Pliny—Animals
and gems—Occult medicine—Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded
as magicians—Some bits of astrology—Alexander the Great—The
_Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo—Marvels of animals—Animals and
astrology—The cynocephalus—Horapollo the cosmopolitan.
[Sidenote: Aelian _On the Nature of Animals_.]
From mystic and theurgic compositions we return to works of the
declining Roman Empire which deal more directly with nature but,
it must be confessed, in a manner somewhat fantastic. About the
beginning of the third century, Aelian of Praeneste, who is included
by Philostratus in his _Lives of the Sophists_, wrote _On the Nature
of Animals_.[1439] Its seventeen books, written in Greek, which Aelian
used fluently despite his Latin birth, are believed to have reached us
partly in interpolated form through two families of manuscripts, of
which the older and less interpolated text is found in a thirteenth
century manuscript at Paris and a somewhat earlier Vatican codex.[1440]
A number of its chapters are similar to and perhaps borrowed from
Pliny’s _Natural History_; at any rate they are commonplaces of ancient
science; but the work also has a marked individuality. Parallels have
also been noted between this work and the later _Hexaemeron_ of the
church father Basil. Aelian was much cited in Byzantine literature and
learning, and if he was not directly used in the Latin west, at least
the attitude toward animals which he displays and his selection of
material concerning them are as apt precursors of medieval Latin as of
medieval Greek scientific literature.
[Sidenote: General character of the work.]
In preface and epilogue Aelian himself adequately indicates
the character of his work. He is impressed by the customs and
characteristics of animals, and marvels at their wisdom and native
shrewdness, their justice and modesty, their affection and piety, which
should put human beings to blush. Thus Aelian’s work is marked by that
tendency which runs through ancient and medieval literature to admire
actions in the irrational brutes which seem to indicate almost human
intelligence and virtue on their part, and to moralize therefrom at the
expense of human beings. Another striking feature of his work is its
utterly whimsical and haphazard order. He mentions things simply as
they happen to occur to him. This fact, too, he recognizes, but refuses
to apologize for, stating that it suits him, if it does not suit anyone
else, and that he regards a mixed-up order as more motley, variegated,
and pleasing. Not only does he attempt no classification whatever of
his animals and mention snakes and quadrupeds and birds in the same
breath; he also does not complete the treatment of a given animal in
one passage but may scatter detached items about it throughout his
work. There is, for instance, probably at least one chapter concerning
elephants in each of his seventeen books.
[Sidenote: Its hodge-podge of unclassified detail.]
It would therefore be absurd for us to attempt any logical arrangement
in discussing his contents; we may do justice to him most adequately by
adopting his own lack of method and noting a few items and topics taken
more or less at random from his work. Ants never go out in the new
moon. Yet they neither gaze at the sky, nor count the number of days
on their fingers, like the learned Babylonians and Chaldeans, but have
this marvelous gift from nature.[1441] In sexual intercourse the female
viper conceives through the mouth and bites off the head of the male;
afterwards her young gnaw their way out of her vitals. “What have your
Oresteses and Alcmaeons to say to that, my dear tragedians?”[1442]
Doves put laurel boughs in their nests to guard against fascination and
the evil eye, and the hoopoe similarly employs ἀδίαvτον or καλλίτριχον
as an amulet;[1443] and other unreasoning animals guard against sorcery
by some mystic and marvelous natural power. Another chapter treats
of divinations from the crow and how hairs are dyed black with its
eggs.[1444] Others tell us of the generation of serpents from the
marrow of a dead man’s spine,[1445] and of venomous women like Medea
and Circe who are worse than the asp with its incurable sting, since
they kill by mere touch.[1446]
We go on to read of swift little beasts called _Pyrigoni_ who are
generated from fire and live in it, of salamanders who extinguish
flames, of the remedies used by the tortoise against snakes, of the
chastity of doves whose marriages never result in divorce, and of the
incontinence of the partridge.[1447] Also of the jealousies of certain
animals like the stag which hides its right horn, the lizard who
devours its cast-off skin, and the mare who eats the hippomanes from
its colt, lest men obtain these precious substances.[1448] Of the care
taken by storks, herons, and pelicans of their aged parents.[1449] How
the swallow by the virtue of an herb gives sight to its young who are
born blind, and how a hoopoe found an herb whose virtue dissolved the
mud with which the caretaker of a building had plugged up the hole in
the wall which it used for its nest.[1450] How the lion and basilisk
fear the cock, and of a lake without fish in a place where the cocks do
not crow.[1451]
How elephants venerate the waxing moon; how the weasel eats rue when
about to fight the snake; and of the jealousy of the hedgehog and
lynx, the latter concealing his precious urine, the other watering
his own hide when he is captured in order to spoil it.[1452] How
the Indians fight griffins when collecting gold.[1453] How the
presence of a cock aids a woman’s delivery.[1454] Of unnamed beasts
in Libya who know how to count and leave an eleventh part of their
prey untouched.[1455] That the sea dragon is easily captured with
the left hand but not with the right.[1456] Dragons know the force
of herbs and cure themselves with some and increase their venom with
others.[1457] How dogs, cows, and other animals sense a famine or
plague beforehand.[1458] How the Egyptians by their magic charm birds
from the sky and snakes from their holes.[1459] When it rains in Egypt,
mice are born from the small drops and plague the country. Traps and
fences and ditches are of no avail against them, as they can leap over
trenches and walls. Consequently the Egyptians are forced to pray God
to end the calamity,[1460]—an interesting variant on the Old Testament
account of the plagues of Egypt.
In dogs there exists a certain dialectical faculty of
ratiocination.[1461] The weather may be predicted from birds,
quadrupeds, and flies.[1462] The she-goat can cure suffusion of its
eyes.[1463] Eagles drop tortoises on rocks to break their shells
and the bald-headed poet Aeschylus met his death by having his pate
mistaken thus for a smooth round stone.[1464] Some predict the future
by birds, others by entrails, or by grains, sieves, and cheeses; the
Lycians practice divination by fish.[1465] A stork whom a widow of
Tarentum helped when it was too young to fly brought her a luminous
precious stone the following year.[1466] Solon did not have to enact
a law ordering children to support their aged parents in the case
of lions, whose cubs are taught by nature filial piety toward their
elders.[1467] Only the horn of the Scythian ass can hold the water of
the Arcadian river Styx; Alexander the Great sent a sample of it to
Delphi with some accompanying verses which Aelian quotes.[1468] In
Epirus dragons sacred to Apollo are employed in divination, and in the
Lavinian Grove dragons spit out again the frumenty offered them by
unchaste virgins.[1469] By flying beneath it an eagle saved the life of
its young one who had been thrown down from a tower.[1470] Different
fish eat different sea herbs.[1471] There are fish who live in boiling
water.[1472] There are scattered mentions of the marvels of India
throughout Aelian’s work, and in his sixteenth book the first fourteen
chapters are almost exclusively concerned with the animals of that land.
[Sidenote: Solinus in the middle ages.]
A well-known work in the middle ages dating from the period of the
Roman Empire was the _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_ or _Polyhistor_
of Solinus. Mommsen’s edition lists 153 manuscripts from 32
places,[1473] and we shall find many citations of Solinus in our later
medieval authors. Martianus Capella and Isidore were the first to make
extensive use of his work. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus
had little respect for Solinus as an authority and expressed more
than once the quite accurate opinion that his work was full of lies.
Nevertheless copies of it continued to abound in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and by 1554 five printed editions had appeared.
“From it directly come most of the fables in works of object so
different as those of Dicuil, Isidore, Capella, and Priscian.”[1474]
[Sidenote: His date.]
The first extant author to make use of Solinus is Augustine in
_The City of God_, while he is first named in the _Genealogus_ of
455 A. D. None of the manuscripts of the work antedate the ninth
century, but many of them have copied an earlier subscription from a
manuscript written “by the zeal and diligence of our lord Theodosius,
the unconquered prince.” This is taken to refer to the emperor
Theodosius II, 401-450. The work itself, however, has no Christian
characteristics; on the contrary it is very fond of mentioning places
famed in pagan religion and Greek mythology and of recounting miracles
and marvels connected with heathen shrines and rites. Indeed, Solinus
seldom, if ever, mentions anything later than the first century of
our era. He speaks of Byzantium, not of Constantinople, and makes no
mention of the Roman provinces as divided in the system of Diocletian.
His book, however, is a compilation from earlier writings so that we
need not expect allusions to his own age. The Latin style and general
literary make-up of the work are characteristic of the declining empire
and early medieval period. Mommsen was inclined to date Solinus in the
third rather than the fourth century, but the work seems to have been
revised about the sixth century, after which date it became customary
to call it the _Polyhistor_ rather than the _Collectanea rerum
memorabilium_. It is also referred to, however, as _De mirabilibus
mundi_, or _Wonders of the World_.
[Sidenote: General character of his work: its relation to Pliny.]
The work is primarily a geography and is arranged by countries and
places, beginning with Rome and Italy. As each locality is considered,
Solinus sometimes tells a little of its history, but is especially
inclined to recount miraculous religious events or natural marvels
associated with that particular region. Thus in describing two lakes
he rather apologizes for mentioning the first at all because it
can scarcely be called miraculous, but assures us that the second
“is regarded as very extraordinary.”[1475] Sometimes he digresses
to other topics such as calendar reform.[1476] Solinus draws both
his geographical data and further details very largely from Pliny’s
_Natural History_; but inasmuch as Pliny treated of these matters
in separate books, Solinus has to re-organize the material. He
also selects simply a few particulars from Pliny’s wealth of detail
on any given subject, and furthermore considerably alters Pliny’s
wording, sometimes condensing the thought, sometimes amplifying the
phraseology—apparently in an effort to make the point clearer and
easier reading. Of Pliny’s thirty-seven books only those from the third
to the thirteenth inclusive and the last book are used to any extent
by Solinus. That is to say, he either was acquainted with only, or
confined himself to, those books dealing with geography, man and other
animals, and gems, omitting almost entirely, except for the twelfth
and thirteenth books, Pliny’s elaborate treatment of vegetation and of
medicinal simples[1477] and discussion of metals and the fine arts.
Solinus does not acknowledge his great debt to Pliny in particular,
although he keeps alluding to the fulness with which everything has
already been discussed by past authors, and although he cites other
writers who are almost unknown to us. Of his known sources Pomponius
Mela is the chief after Pliny but is used much less. On the other hand,
the number of passages for which Mommsen was unable to give any source
is not inconsiderable. As may have been already inferred, the work
of Solinus is brief; the text alone would scarcely fill one hundred
pages.[1478]
[Sidenote: Animals and gems.]
It would perhaps be rash to conjecture which quality commended the
book most to the following period: its handy size, or its easy style
and fairly systematic arrangement, or its emphasis upon marvels. The
last characteristic is at least the most germane to our investigation.
Solinus rendered the service, if we may so term it, of reducing Pliny’s
treatment of animals and precious stones in particular to a few common
examples, which either were already the best known or became so as
a result of his selection. Indeed, King was of the opinion that the
descriptions of gems in Solinus were more precise, technical, and
systematic than those in Pliny, and found his notices “often extremely
useful.”[1479] Solinus describes such animals as the wolf, lynx, bear,
lion, hyena, _onager_ or wild ass, basilisk, crocodile, hippopotamus,
phoenix, dolphin, and chameleon; and recounts the marvelous properties
of such gems as _achates_ or agate, _galactites_, _catochites_,
crystal, _gagates_, adamant, heliotrope, hyacinth, and _paeanites_.
The dragons of India and Ethiopia also occupy his attention, as they
did that of Philostratus in the _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_; indeed,
he repeats in different words the statement found in Philostratus that
they swim far out to sea.[1480] In Sardinia, on the contrary, there are
no snakes, but a poisonous ant exists there. Fortunately there are also
healing waters there with which to counteract its venom, but there is
also native to Sardinia an herb called _Sardonia_ which causes those
who eat it to die of laughter.[1481]
[Sidenote: Occult medicine.]
Although Solinus makes no use of Pliny’s medical books, he shows
considerable interest in the healing properties of simples and in
medicine. He tells us that those who slept in the shrine of Aesculapius
at Epidaurus were warned in dreams how to heal their diseases,[1482]
and that the third daughter of Aeetes, named Angitia, devoted herself
“to resisting disease by the salubrious science” of medicine.[1483]
According to Solinus Circe as well as Medea was a daughter of Aeetes,
but usually in Greek mythology she is represented as his sister.
[Sidenote: Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded as magicians.]
This allusion to Circe and Medea shows that magic, to which medicine
and pharmacy are apparently akin, does not pass unnoticed in Solinus’s
page. He copies from Mela the account of the periodical transformation
of the _Neuri_ into wolves.[1484] But instead of accusing Democritus
of having employed magic, as Pliny does, Solinus represents him as
engaging in contests with the _Magi_, in which he made frequent use
of the stone _catochites_ in order to demonstrate the occult power
of nature.[1485] That is to say, Democritus was apparently opposing
science to magic and showing that all the latter’s feats could be
duplicated or improved upon by employing natural forces. In two other
passages[1486] Solinus calls Democritus _physicus_, or scientist, and
affirms that his birth in Abdera did more to make that town famous than
any other thing connected with it, despite the fact that it was founded
by and named after the sister of Diomedes. Zoroaster, too, whom Pliny
called the founder of the magic art, is not spoken of as a magician by
Solinus, although he is mentioned three times and is described as “most
skilled in the best arts,” and is cited concerning the power of coral
and of the gem _aetites_.[1487]
[Sidenote: Some bits of astrology.]
It is not part of Solinus’s plan to describe the heavens, but he
occasionally alludes to “the discipline of the stars,”[1488] as he
calls astronomy or astrology. On the authority of L. Tarrutius, “most
renowned of astrologers,”[1489] he tells us that the foundations of the
walls of Rome were laid by Romulus in his twenty-second year on the
eleventh day of the kalends of May between the second and third hours,
when Jupiter was in Pisces, the sun in Taurus, the moon in Libra, and
the other four planets in the sign of the scorpion. He also speaks of
the star Arcturus destroying the Argive fleet off Euboea on its return
from Ilium.[1490]
[Sidenote: Alexander the Great.]
Alexander the Great figures prominently in the pages of Alexander
Solinus, being mentioned a score of times, and this too corresponds to
the medieval interest in the Macedonian conqueror. Stories concerning
him are repeated from Pliny, but Solinus also displays further
information. He insists that Philip was truly his father, although he
adds that Olympias strove to acquire a nobler father for him, when
she affirmed that she had had intercourse with a dragon, and that
Alexander tried to have himself considered of divine descent.[1491]
The statement concerning Olympias suggests the story of Nectanebus,
of which a later chapter will treat, but that individual is not
mentioned, although Aristotle and Callisthenes are spoken of as
Alexander’s tutors, so that it is doubtful if Solinus was acquainted
with the _Pseudo-Callisthenes_. He describes Alexander’s line of march
with fair accuracy and not in the totally incorrect manner of the
_Pseudo-Callisthenes_.
[Sidenote: The _Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo.]
In seeking a third text and author of the same type as Aelian and
Solinus to round out the present chapter, our choice unhesitatingly
falls upon the _Hieroglyphics_ of Horapollo, a work which pretends to
explain the meaning of the written symbols employed by the ancient
Egyptian priests, but which is really principally concerned with
the same marvelous habits and properties of animals of which Aelian
treated. In brief the idea is that these characteristics of animals
must be known in order to comprehend the significance of the animal
figures in the ancient hieroglyphic writing. Horapollo is supposed to
have written in the Egyptian language in perhaps the fourth or fifth
century of our era,[1492] but his work is extant only in the Greek
translation of it made by a Philip who lived a century or two later and
who seems to have made some additions of his own.[1493]
[Sidenote: Marvels of animals.]
The zoology of Horapollo is for the most part not novel, but repeats
the same erroneous notions that may be found in Aristotle’s _History
of Animals_, Pliny’s _Natural History_, Aelian, and other ancient
authors. Again we hear of the basilisk’s fatal breath, of the beaver’s
discarded testicles, of the unnatural methods of conception of the
weasel and viper, of the bear’s licking its cubs into shape, of the
kindness of storks to their parents, of wasps generated from a dead
horse, of the phoenix, of the swan’s song, of the sick lion’s eating
an ape to cure himself, of the bull tamed by tying it to the branch of
a wild fig tree, of the elephant’s fear of a ram or a dog and how it
buries its tusks.[1494] Less familiar perhaps are the assertions that
the mare miscarries, if she merely treads on a wolf’s tracks;[1495]
that the pigeon cures itself by placing laurel in its nest;[1496] that
putting the wings of a bat on an ant-hill will prevent the ants from
coming out.[1497] The statement that if the hyena, when hunted, turns
to the right, it will slay its pursuer, while if it turns to the left,
it will be slain by him, is also found in Pliny.[1498] But his long
enumeration of virtues ascribed to parts of the hyena by the _Magi_
does not include the assertion in Horapollo’s next chapter[1499] that a
man girded with a hyena skin can pass through the ranks of his enemies
without injury, although it ascribes somewhat similar virtues to the
animal’s skin. In Horapollo it is the hawk rather than the eagle which
surpasses other winged creatures in its ability to gaze at the sun;
hence physicians use the hawkweed in eye-cures.[1500]
[Sidenote: Animals and astrology.]
Animals also serve as astronomical or astrological symbols in the
system of hieroglyphic writing as interpreted by Horapollo. Not only
does a palm tree represent the year because it puts forth a new branch
every new moon,[1501] but the phoenix denotes the _magnus annus_ in the
course of which the heavenly bodies complete their revolutions.[1502]
The scarab rolls his ball of dung from east to west and gives it
the shape of the universe.[1503] He buries it for twenty-eight days
conformably to the course of the moon through the zodiac, but he
has thirty toes to correspond to the days of the month. As there is
no female scarab, so there is no male vulture. The female vulture
symbolizes the Egyptian year by spending five days in conceiving by
the wind, one hundred and twenty in pregnancy, the same period in
rearing its young, and the remaining one hundred and twenty days in
preparing itself to repeat the process.[1504] The vulture also visits
battlefields seven days in advance and by the direction of its glance
indicates which army will be defeated.
[Sidenote: The cynocephalus.]
The cynocephalus, dog-headed ape, or baboon, was mentioned several
times by Pliny, but Horapollo gives more specific information
concerning it, chiefly of an astrological character. It is born
circumcised and is reared in temples in order to learn from it the
exact hour of lunar eclipses, at which times it neither sees nor
eats, while the female _ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit_. The
cynocephalus represents the inhabitable world which has seventy-two
primitive parts, because the animal dies and is buried piecemeal by
the priests during a period of as many days, until at the end of the
seventy-second day life has entirely departed from the last remnant of
its carcass.[1505] The cynocephalus not only marks the time of eclipses
but at the equinoxes makes water twelve times by day and by night,
marking off the hours; hence a figure of it is carved by the Egyptians
on their water-clocks.[1506] Horapollo associates together the god of
the universe and fate and the stars which are five in number, for he
believes that five planets carry out the economy of the universe and
that they are subject to God’s government.[1507]
[Sidenote: Horapollo the cosmopolitan.]
Horapollo cannot be given high rank either as a zoologist and
astronomer, or a philologer and archaeologist; but at least he was no
narrow nationalist and had some respect for history. The Egyptians,
he says, “denote a man who has never left his own country by a human
figure with the head of an ass, because he neither hears any history
nor knows of what is going on abroad.”[1508]
BOOK II. EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
Foreword.
Chapter 13. The Book of Enoch.
” 14. Philo Judaeus.
” 15. The Gnostics.
” 16. The Christian Apocrypha.
” 17. The Recognitions of Clement and Simon Magus.
” 18. The Confession of Cyprian and some similar stories.
” 19. Origen and Celsus.
” 20. Other Christian Discussion of Magic before Augustine.
” 21. Christianity and Natural Science; Basil, Epiphanius, and the
Physiologus.
” 22. Augustine on Magic and Astrology.
” 23. The Fusion of Pagan and Christian Thought in the Fourth
and Fifth Centuries.
BOOK II. EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
FOREWORD
We now turn back chronologically to the point from which we started
in our survey of classical science and magic in order to trace the
development of Christian thought in regard to the same subjects. How
far did Christianity break with ancient science and superstition? To
what extent did it borrow from them?
[Sidenote: Magic and religion.]
It has often been remarked that, as a new religion comes to prevail in
a society, the old rites are discredited and prohibited as magic. The
faith and ceremonies of the majority, performed publicly, are called
religion: the discarded cult, now practiced only privately and covertly
by a minority, is stigmatized as magic and contrary to the general
good. Thus we shall hear Christian writers condemn the pagan oracles
and auguries as arts of divination, and classify the ancient gods as
demons of the same sort as those invoked in the magic arts. Conversely,
when a new religion is being introduced, is as yet regarded as a
foreign faith, and is still only the private worship of a minority,
the majority regard it as outlandish magic. And this we shall find
illustrated by the accusations of sorcery and magic heaped upon Jesus
by the Jews, and upon the Jews and the early Christians by a world long
accustomed to pagan rites. The same bandying back and forth of the
charge of magic occurred between Mohammed and the Meccans.[1509]
[Sidenote: Relation between early Christian and medieval literature.]
It is perhaps generally assumed that the men of the middle ages were
widely read in and deeply influenced by the fathers of the early
church, but at least for our subject this influence has hardly been
treated either broadly or in detail. Indeed, the predilection of the
humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for anything written
in Greek and their aversion to medieval Latin has too long operated
as a bar to the study of medieval literature in general. And scholars
who have edited or studied the Greek, Syriac, and other ancient texts
connected with early Christianity have perhaps too often neglected the
Latin versions preserved in medieval manuscripts, or, while treasuring
up every hint that Photius lets fall, have failed to note the citations
and allusions in medieval Latin encyclopedists. Yet it is often the
case that the manuscripts containing the Latin versions are of earlier
date than those which seem to preserve the Greek original text.
[Sidenote: Method of presenting early Christian thought.]
There is so much repetition and resemblance between the numerous
Christian writers in Greek and Latin of the Roman Empire that I have
even less than in the case of their classical contemporaries attempted
a complete presentation of them, but, while not intending to omit any
account of the first importance in the history of magic or experimental
science, have aimed to make a selection of representative persons
and typical passages. At the same time, in the case of those authors
and works which are discussed, the aim is to present their thought
in sufficiently specific detail to enable the reader to estimate for
himself their scientific or superstitious character and their relations
to classical thought on the one hand and medieval thought on the other.
Before we treat of Christian writings themselves it is essential to
notice some related lines of thought and groups of writings which
either preceded or accompanied the development of Christian thought
and literature, and which either influenced even orthodox thought
powerfully, or illustrate foreign elements, aberrations, side-currents,
and undertows which none the less cannot be disregarded in tracing
the main current of Christian belief. We therefore shall successively
treat of the literature extant under the name of Enoch, of the works
of Philo Judaeus, of the doctrines of the Gnostics, of the Christian
_Apocrypha_, of the _Pseudo-Clementines_ and Simon Magus, and of the
_Confession_ of Cyprian and some similar stories. We shall then make
Origen’s _Reply to Celsus_, in which the conflict of classical and
Christian conceptions is well illustrated, our point of departure in
an examination of the attitude of the early fathers towards magic and
science. Succeeding chapters will treat of the attitude toward magic
of other fathers before Augustine, of Christianity and natural science
as shown in Basil’s _Hexaemeron_, Epiphanius’ _Panarion_, and the
_Physiologus_, and of Augustine himself. A final chapter on the fusion
of paganism and Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries will
terminate this second division of our investigation and also serve as a
supplement to the preceding division and an introduction to the third
book on the early middle ages. Our arrangement is thus in part topical
rather than strictly chronological. The dates of many authors and works
are too dubious, there is too much of the apocryphal and interpolated,
and we have to rely too much upon later writers for the views of
earlier ones, to make a strictly or even primarily chronological
arrangement either advisable or feasible.
CHAPTER XIII
THE BOOK OF ENOCH
Enoch’s reputation as an astrologer in the middle ages—Date and
influence of the literature ascribed to Enoch—Angels governing the
universe; stars and angels—The fallen angels teach men magic and
other arts—The stars as sinners—Effect of sin upon nature—Celestial
phenomena—Mountains and metals—Strange animals.
[Sidenote: Enoch’s reputation as an astrologer in the middle ages.]
In collections of medieval manuscripts there often is found a treatise
on fifteen stars, fifteen herbs, fifteen stones, and fifteen figures
engraved upon them, which is attributed sometimes to Hermes, presumably
Trismegistus, and sometimes to Enoch, the patriarch, who “walked with
God and was not.”[1510] Indeed in the prologue to a Hermetic work on
astrology in a medieval manuscript we are told that Enoch and the
first of the three Hermeses or Mercuries are identical.[1511] This
treatise probably has no direct relation to the _Book of Enoch_,
which we shall discuss in this chapter and which was composed in the
pre-Christian period. But it is interesting to observe that the same
reputation for astrology, which led the middle ages sometimes to
ascribe this treatise to Enoch, is likewise found in “the first notice
of a book of Enoch,” which “appears to be due to a Jewish or Samaritan
Hellenist,” which “has come down to us successively through Alexander
Polyhistor and Eusebius,” and which states that Enoch was the founder
of astrology.[1512] The statement in Genesis that Enoch lived three
hundred and sixty-five years would also lead men to associate him with
the solar year and stars.
[Sidenote: Date and influence of the literature ascribed to Enoch.]
The _Book of Enoch_ is “the precipitate of a literature, once very
active, which revolved ... round Enoch,” and in the form which has
come down to us is a patchwork from “several originally independent
books.”[1513] It is extant in the form of Greek fragments preserved in
the _Chronography_ of G. Syncellus,[1514] or but lately discovered in
(Upper) Egypt, and in more complete but also more recent manuscripts
giving an Ethiopic and a Slavonic version.[1515] These last two
versions are quite different both in language and content, while some
of the citations of Enoch in ancient writers apply to neither of these
versions. While “Ethiopic did not exist as a literary language before
350 A. D.,”[1516] and none of the extant manuscripts of the Ethiopic
version is earlier than the fifteenth century,[1517] Charles believes
that they are based upon a Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic
original, and that even the interpolations in this were made by an
editor living before the Christian era. He asserts that “nearly all the
writers of the New Testament were familiar with it,” and influenced by
it,—in fact that its influence on the New Testament was greater than
that of all the other apocrypha together, and that it “had all the
weight of a canonical book” with the early church fathers.[1518] After
300 A. D., however, it became discredited, except as we have seen among
Ethiopic and Slavonic Christians. Before 300 Origen in his _Reply to
Celsus_[1519] accuses his opponent of quoting the _Book of Enoch_ as
a Christian authority concerning the fallen angels. Origen objects
that “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate
in the Churches as divine.” Augustine, in the _City of God_,[1520]
written between 413 and 426, admits that Enoch “left some divine
writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical
epistle.” But he doubts if any of the writings current in his own day
are genuine and thinks that they have been wisely excluded from the
course of Scripture. Lods writes that after the ninth century in the
east and from a much earlier date in the west, the _Book of Enoch_ is
not mentioned, “At the most some medieval rabbis seem still to know of
it.”[1521] Yet Alexander Neckam, in the twelfth century, speaks as if
Latin Christendom of that date had some acquaintance with the Enoch
literature. We shall note some passages in Saint Hildegard which seem
parallel to others in the _Book of Enoch_, while Vincent of Beauvais
in his _Speculum naturale_ in the thirteenth century, in justifying a
certain discriminating use of the apocryphal books, points out that
Jude quotes Enoch whose book is now called apocryphal.[1522]
[Sidenote: Angels governing the universe: stars and angels.]
The Enoch literature has much to say concerning angels, and implies
their control of nature, man, and the future. We hear of Raphael,
“who is set over all the diseases and wounds of the children of men”;
Gabriel, “who is set over all the powers”; Phanuel, “who is set over
the repentance and hope of those who inherit eternal life.”[1523] The
revolution of the stars is described as “according to the number of
the angels,” and in the Slavonic version the number of those angels
is stated as two hundred.[1524] Indeed the stars themselves are often
personified and we read “how they keep faith with each other” and even
of “all the stars whose privy members are like those of horses.”[1525]
The Ethiopic version also speaks of the angels or spirits of
hoar-frost, dew, hail, snow and so forth.[1526] In the Slavonic version
Enoch finds in the sixth heaven the angels who attend to the phases of
the moon and the revolutions of stars and sun and who superintend the
good or evil condition of the world. He finds angels set over the years
and seasons, the rivers and sea, the fruits of the earth, and even an
angel over every herb.[1527]
[Sidenote: The fallen angels teach men magic and other arts.]
The fallen angels in particular are mentioned in the _Book of Enoch_.
Two hundred angels lusted after the comely daughters of men and bound
themselves by oaths to marry them.[1528] After having thus taken
unto themselves wives, they instructed the human race in the art of
magic and the science of botany—or to be more exact, “charms and
enchantments” and “the cutting of roots and of woods.” In another
chapter various individual angels are named who taught respectively
the enchanters and botanists, the breaking of charms, astrology, and
various branches thereof.[1529] In the Greek fragment preserved by
Syncellus there are further mentioned pharmacy, and what probably
denote geomancy (“sign of the earth”) and aeromancy (_aeroskopia_).
Through this revelation of mysteries which should have been kept hid
we are told that men “know all the secrets of the angels, and all the
violence of the Satans, and all their occult power, and all the power
of those who practice sorcery, and the power of witchcraft, and the
power of those who make molten images for the whole earth.”[1530]
The revelation included, moreover, not only magic arts, witchcraft,
divination, and astrology, but also natural sciences, such as botany
and pharmacy—which, however, are apparently regarded as closely akin
to magic—and useful arts such as mining metals, manufacturing armor
and weapons, and “writing with ink and paper”—“and thereby many sinned
from eternity to eternity and until this day.”[1531] As the preceding
remark indicates, the author is decidedly of the opinion that men were
not created to the end that they should write with pen and ink. “For
man was created exactly like the angels to the intent that he should
continue righteous and pure, ... but through this their knowledge men
are perishing.”[1532] Perhaps the writer means to censure writing as
magical and thinks of it only as mystic signs and characters. Magic
is always regarded as evil in the Enoch literature, and witchcraft,
enchantments, and “devilish magic” are given a prominent place in a
list in the Slavonic version[1533] of evil deeds done upon earth.
[Sidenote: The stars as sinners.]
In connection with the fallen angels we find the stars regarded as
capable of sin as well as personified. In the Ethiopic version there
is more than one mention of seven stars that transgressed the command
of God and are bound against the day of judgment or for the space of
ten thousand years.[1534] One passage tells how “judgment was held
first over the stars, and they were judged and found guilty, and went
to the place of condemnation, and they were cast into an abyss.”[1535]
A similar identification of the stars with the fallen angels is found
in one of the visions of Saint Hildegard in the twelfth century. She
writes, “I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it
an exceeding multitude of falling sparks which with the star followed
southward. And they examined Him upon His throne almost as something
hostile, and turning from Him, they sought rather the north. And
suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals ...
and cast into the abyss that I could see them no more.”[1536] She then
interprets the vision as signifying the fall of the angels.
[Sidenote: Effect of sin upon nature.]
An idea which we shall find a number of times in other ancient and
medieval writers appears also in the _Book of Enoch_. It is that human
sin upsets the world of nature, and in this particular case, even the
period of the moon and the orbits of the stars.[1537] Hildegard again
roughly parallels the Enoch literature by holding that the original
harmony of the four elements upon this earth was changed into a
confused and disorderly mixture after the fall of man.[1538]
[Sidenote: Celestial phenomena]
The natural world, although intimately associated with the spiritual
world and hardly distinguished from it in the Enoch literature,
receives considerable attention, and much of the discussion in both
the Ethiopic and Slavonic versions is of a scientific rather than
ethical or apocalyptic character. One section of the Ethiopic version
is described by Charles[1539] as the _Book of Celestial Physics_ and
upholds a calendar based upon the lunar year. The Slavonic version,
on the other hand, while mentioning the lunar year of 354 days and
the solar year of 365 and ¼ days, seems to prefer the latter, since
the years of Enoch’s life are given as 365, and he writes 366 books
concerning what he has seen in his visions and voyages.[1540] The
_Book of Enoch_ supposes a plurality of heavens.[1541] In the Slavonic
version Enoch is taken through the seven heavens, or ten heavens
in one manuscript, with the signs of the zodiac in the eighth and
ninth. An account is also given of the creation, and the waters above
the firmament, which were to give the early Christian apologists and
medieval clerical scientists so much difficulty, are described as
follows: “And thus I made firm the waters, that is, the depths, and I
surrounded the waters with light, and I created seven circles, and I
fashioned them like crystal, moist and dry, that is to say, like glass
and ice, and as for the waters and also the other elements I showed
each of them their paths, (viz.) to the seven stars, each of them in
their heaven, how they should go.”[1542] The order of the seven planets
in their circles is given as follows: in the first and highest circle
the star Kruno, then Aphrodite or Venus, Ares (Mars), the sun, Zeus
(Jupiter), Hermes (Mercury), and the moon.[1543] God also tells Enoch
that the duration of the world will be for a week of years, that is,
seven thousand, after which “let there be at the beginning of the
eighth thousand a time when there is no computation and no end; neither
years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.”[1544]
[Sidenote: Mountains and metals.]
Turning from celestial physics to terrestrial phenomena, we may note a
few allusions to minerals, vegetation, and animals. “Seven mountains
of magnificent stones” are more than once mentioned in the Ethiopic
version and are described as each different from the other.[1545]
Another passage speaks of “seven mountains full of choice nard and
aromatic trees and cinnamon and pepper.”[1546] But whether these
groups of seven mountains are to be astrologically related to the seven
planets is not definitely stated. We are also left in doubt whether
the following passage may have some astrological or even alchemical
significance, or whether it is merely a figurative prophecy like that
in the Book of Daniel concerning the image seen by Nebuchadnezzar in
his dream. “There mine eyes saw all the hidden things of heaven that
shall be, an iron mountain, and one of copper, and one of silver, and
one of gold, and one of soft metal, and one of lead.”[1547] At any rate
Enoch has come very near to listing the seven metals usually associated
with the seven planets. In another passage we are informed that while
silver and “soft metal” come from the earth, lead and tin are produced
by a fountain in which an eminent angel stands.[1548]
[Sidenote: Strange animals.]
As for animals we are informed that Behemoth is male and Leviathan
female.[1549] When Enoch went to the ends of the earth he saw there
great beasts and birds who differed in appearance, beauty, and
voice.[1550] In the Slavonic version we hear a good deal of phoenixes
and _chalkydri_, who seem to be flying dragons. These creatures are
described as “strange in appearance with the feet and tails of lions
and the heads of crocodiles. Their appearance was of a purple color
like the rainbow; their size, nine hundred measures. Their wings were
like those of angels, each with twelve, and they attend the chariot of
the sun, and go with him, bringing heat and dew as they are ordered by
God.”[1551]
CHAPTER XIV
PHILO JUDAEUS
Bibliographical note—Philo the mediator between Hellenistic and
Jewish-Christian thought—His influence upon the middle ages was
indirect—Good and bad magic—Stars not gods nor first causes—But
rational and virtuous animals, and God’s viceroys over inferiors—They
do not cause evil; but it is possible to predict the future from
their motions—Jewish astrology—Perfection of the number seven—And
of fifty—Also of four and six—Spirits of the air—Interpretation
of dreams—Politics are akin to magic—A thought repeated by Moses
Maimonides and Albertus Magnus.
“_But since every city in which laws are properly established has a
regular constitution, it became necessary for this citizen of the
world to adopt the same constitution as that which prevailed in the
universal world. And this constitution is the right reason of nature._”
—_On Creation_, cap. 50.
[Sidenote: Philo the mediator between Hellenistic and Jewish-Christian
thought.]
There probably is no other man who marks so well the fusion of
Hellenic and Hebrew ideas and the transition from them to Christian
thought as Philo Judaeus.[1552] He flourished at Alexandria in the
first years of our era—the exact dates both of his birth and of his
death are uncertain—and speaks of himself as an old man at the time
of his participation in the embassy of Jews to the Emperor Gaius or
Caligula in 40 A. D. He repeats the doctrines of the Greek philosophers
and anticipates much that the church fathers discuss. Before the
Neo-Platonists he regards matter as the source of all evil and feels
the necessity of mediators, angels or demons, between God and man.
Before the medieval revival of Aristotle and natural philosophy he
tries to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with belief in a
world soul, and monotheism with astrology. Before the rise of Christian
monasticism he describes in his treatise _On the Contemplative Life_
an ascetic community of _Therapeutae_ at Lake Maerotis.[1553] After
Pythagoras he enlarges upon the mystic significance of numbers. After
Plato he repeats the conception of an ideal city of God which was to
gain such a hold upon Christian imagination.[1554] After the Stoics he
proclaims the doctrine of the law of nature, holds that the institution
of human slavery is absolutely contrary to it, and writes “a treatise
to prove that every virtuous man is free” and that to be virtuous is to
live in conformity to nature.[1555] He had previously written another
treatise designed to show that “every wicked man was a slave,”[1556]
and he held a theory which we met in the Enoch literature and shall
meet again in a number of subsequent writers that sin was punished
naturally by forces of nature such as floods and thunderbolts. He did
not originate the practice of allegorical interpretation of the Bible
but he is our first great extant example thereof. He even went so far
as to regard the tree of life and the story of the serpent tempting
Eve as purely symbolical, an attitude which found little favor with
Christian writers.[1557] His effort by means of the allegorical method
to find in the books of the Pentateuch all the attractive concepts
and theories which he had learned from the Greeks became later in
the Christian apologists an assertion that Plato and Pythagoras had
borrowed their doctrines from Abraham and Moses. His doctrine of the
_logos_ had a powerful influence upon the writers of the New Testament
and the theology of the early church.[1558] Yet Philo affirms that no
more perfect good than philosophy exists in human life and in both
literary style and erudition he is a Hellene to his very finger tips.
The recent tendency, seen especially in German scholarship, to deny the
writers of the Roman Empire any capacity for original thought and to
trace back their ideas to unextant authors of a supposedly much more
productive Hellenistic age has perhaps been carried too far. But if we
may not regard Philo as a great originator, and it is evident that he
borrowed many of his ideas, he was at any rate a great transmitter of
thought, a mediator after his own heart between Jews and Greeks, and
between them both and the Christian writers to come. Standing at the
close of the Hellenistic age and at the opening of the Roman period,
he occupies in the history of speculative and theological thought an
analogous position to that of Pliny the Elder in the history of natural
science, gathering up the lore of the past, perhaps improving it with
some additions of his own, and exercising a profound influence upon the
age to come.
[Sidenote: His influence upon the middle ages was indirect.]
Philo’s medieval influence, however, was probably more indirect than
Pliny’s and passed itself on through yet other mediators to the more
remote times. Comparatively speaking, the _Natural History_ of Pliny
probably was more important in the middle ages than in the early Roman
Empire when other authorities prevailed in the Greek-speaking world.
Philo’s influence on the other hand must soon be transmitted through
Christian, and then again through Latin, mediums. This is indicated by
the fact that to-day many of his works are wholly lost or extant only
in fragments[1559] or in Armenian versions,[1560] and that we have no
sure information as to the order in which they were composed.[1561] But
his initial force is none the less of the greatest moment, and seems
amply sufficient to justify us in selecting his writings as one of our
starting points. The extent to which one is apt to find in the writings
of Philo passages which are forerunners of the statements of subsequent
writers, may be illustrated by the familiar story of King Canute and
the tide. Philo in his work _On Dreams_[1562] speaks of the custom of
the Germans of charging the incoming tide with their drawn swords. But
what especially concern us are Philo’s statements concerning magic,
astrology, the stars, the perfection and power of numbers, demons, and
the interpretation of dreams.
[Sidenote: Good and bad magic.]
Philo draws a distinction between magic in the good and bad sense.
The former and true magical art is the lore of learned Persians
called _Magi_ who investigate nature more minutely and deeply than is
usual and explain divine virtues clearly.[1563] The latter magic is a
spurious imitation of the other, practised by quacks and impostors,
old-wives and slaves, who by means of incantations and the like
procedure profess to change men from love to hatred or vice versa and
who “deceive unsuspecting persons and waste whole families away by
degrees and without making any noise.” It is to this adulterated and
evil magic that Philo again refers when he likens political life to
Joseph’s coat of many colors, stained with the blood of wars, and in
which a very little truth is mixed up with a great deal of sophistry
akin to that of the augurs, ventriloquists, sorcerers, jugglers and
enchanters, “from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to
escape.”[1564] This distinction between a magic of the wise and of
nature and that of vulgar impostors is one which we shall find in
many subsequent writers, although it was not recognized by Pliny.
Philo also antecedes numerous Christian commentators upon the Book of
Numbers[1565] in considering the vexed question whether Balaam was an
evil enchanter and diviner, or a divine prophet, or whether he combined
magic and prophecy, and thus indicated that the former art is not evil
but has divine approval. Philo’s conclusion is the more usual one that
Balaam was a celebrated diviner and magician, and that it is impossible
that “holy inspiration should be combined with magic,” but that in the
particular case of his blessing Israel the spirit of divine prophecy
took possession of him and “drove all his artificial system of cunning
divination out of his soul.”[1566]
[Sidenote: Stars not gods nor first causes.]
Philo has considerably more to say upon the subject of astrology than
upon that of magic. He was especially concerned to deny that the stars
were first causes or independent gods. He chided the Chaldean adepts
in genethlialogy for recognizing no other god than the universe and no
other causes than those apparent to the senses, and for regarding fate
and necessity as gods and the periodical revolutions of the heavenly
bodies as the cause of all good and evil.[1567] Philo more than once
exhorts the reader to follow Abraham’s example in leaving Chaldea and
the science of genethlialogy and coming to Charran to a comprehension
of the true nature of God.[1568] He agreed with Moses that the stars
should not be worshiped and that they had been created by God, and more
than that, not created until the fourth day, in order that it might
be perfectly clear to men that they were not the primary causes of
things.[1569]
[Sidenote: But rational and virtuous animals: and God’s viceroys over
inferiors.]
Philo, nevertheless, despite his attack on the Chaldeans, believed
in much which we should call astrological. The stars, although not
independent gods, are nevertheless divine images of surpassing beauty
and possess divine natures, although they are not incorporeal beings.
Philo distinguishes between the stars, men, and other animals as
follows. The beasts are capable of neither virtue nor vice; human
beings are capable of both; the stars are intelligent animals, but
incapable of any evil and wholly virtuous.[1570] They were native-born
citizens of the world long before its first human citizen had been
naturalized.[1571] God, moreover, did not postpone their creation
until the fourth day because superiors are subject to inferiors. On
the contrary they are the viceroys of the Father of all and in the
vast city of this universe the ruling class is made up of the planets
and fixed stars, and the subject class consists of all the natures
beneath the moon.[1572] A relation of natural sympathy exists between
the different parts of the universe, and all things upon the earth are
dependent upon the stars.[1573]
[Sidenote: They do not cause evil: but it is possible to predict the
future from their motions.]
Philo of course will not admit that evil is caused either by the
virtuous stars or by God working through them. As has been said,
he attributed evil to matter or to “the natural changes of the
elements,”[1574] drawing a line between God and nature in much the
fashion of the church fathers later. But he granted that “before now
some men have conjecturally predicted disturbances and commotions of
the earth from the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, and innumerable
other events which have turned out most exactly true.”[1575] Philo’s
interest in astronomy and astrology is further suggested by his
interpretation of the eleven stars of Joseph’s dream as referring to
the signs of the zodiac,[1576] Joseph himself making the twelfth; and
by his interpreting the ladder in Jacob’s dream which stretched between
earth and heaven as referring to the air,[1577] into which earth’s
evaporations dissolve, while the moon is not pure ether like the other
stars but itself contains some air. This accounts, Philo thinks, for
the spots upon the moon—an explanation which I do not remember having
met in subsequent writers.
[Sidenote: Jewish astrology.]
Josephus[1578] and the Jews in general of Philo’s time were equally
devoted to astrology according to Münter, who says: “Only their
astrology was subordinated to theism. The one God always appeared as
the master of the host of heaven. But they regarded the stars as living
divine beings and powers of heaven.”[1579] In the Talmud later we read
that the hour of Abraham’s birth was announced by the stars and that
he feared from his observations of the constellations that he would go
childless. Münter also gives examples of the belief of the rabbis in
the influence of the stars upon the destiny of the Jewish people and
upon the fate of individual men, and of their belief that a star would
announce the coming of the Messiah.[1580]
[Sidenote: Perfection of the number seven.]
From Philo’s astrology it is an easy step to his frequent reveries
concerning the perfection and mystic significance of certain numbers,—a
train of thought which was continued by many of the church fathers,
and is also found in various pagan writers of the Roman Empire.[1581]
Thomas Browne in his enquiry into “Vulgar Errors”[1582] was inclined
to hold Philo even more responsible than Pythagoras or Plato for
the dissemination of such doctrines. Philo himself recognizes the
close connection between astrology and number mysticism, when, after
affirming the dependence of all earthly things upon the heavenly
bodies, he adds: “It is in heaven, too, that the ratio of the number
seven began.”[1583] Philo doubts if it is possible to express
adequately the glories of the number seven, but he feels that he
ought at least to attempt it and devotes a dozen chapters of his
treatise on the creation of the world to it,[1584] to say nothing of
other passages. He notes that there are seven planets, seven circles
of heaven, four quarters of the moon of seven days each, that such
constellations as the Pleiades and Ursa Major consist of seven stars,
and that children born at the end of seven months live, while those
who see the light in the eighth month die. In diseases the seventh
is a critical day. Also there are either seven ages of man’s life,
as Hippocrates says, or, in accordance with Solon’s lines, man’s
three-score years and ten may be subdivided into ten periods of seven
years each. The lyre of seven strings corresponds to the seven planets,
and in speech there are seven vowels. There are seven divisions of the
head—eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, seven divisions of the body,
seven kinds of motion, seven things seen, and even the senses are seven
rather than five if we add the vocal and generative organs.[1585]
[Sidenote: And of fifty.]
Philo’s ideal sect, the _Therapeutae_, are wont to assemble as a
prelude to their greatest feast at the end of seven weeks, “venerating
not only the simple week of seven days but also its multiplied
power,”[1586] but the chief festival itself occurs on the fiftieth day,
“the most holy and natural of numbers, being compounded of the power of
the right-angled triangle, which is the principle of the origination
and condition of the whole.”[1587]
[Sidenote: Also of four and six.]
The numbers four and six, however, yield little to seven and fifty in
the matter of perfection. It was the fourth day that God chose for
the creation of the heavenly bodies, and He did not need six days for
the entire work of creation, but it was fitting that that perfect
work should be accomplished in a perfect number of days. Six is the
product of the first female number, two, and the first male number,
three. Indeed, the first three numbers, one, two, and three, whether
added or multiplied, give six.[1588] As for four, there are that many
elements and seasons; it is the only number produced by the same
number—two—whether added to itself or multiplied by itself; it is the
first square and as such the emblem of justice and equality; it also
represents the cube or solid, as the number one stands for a point,
two for a line, and three for a surface.[1589] Furthermore four is
the source of “the all-perfect decade,” since one and two and three
and four make ten. At this we begin to suspect, and with considerable
justification, as the writings of other devotees of the philosophy of
numbers would show, that the number of perfect numbers is legion. We
may not, however, follow Philo much farther on this topic. Suffice it
to add that he finds the fifth day fitting for the creation of animals
possessed of five senses,[1590] while he divides the ten plagues of
Egypt into three dealing with the more solid elements, earth and water,
and performed by Aaron; three dealing with air and fire which were
entrusted to Moses; the seventh was committed to both Aaron and Moses;
while the other three God reserved for Himself.[1591]
[Sidenote: Spirits of the air.]
Philo believed in a world of spirits, both the angels of the Jews and
the demons of the Greeks. When God said: “Let us make man,” Philo
believed that He was addressing those assistant spirits who should be
held responsible for the viciousness to which man alone of all creation
is liable.[1592] Of the divine rational natures Philo regarded some as
incorporeal, others like the stars as possessed of bodies.[1593] He
also believed that there were spirits in the air as well as afar off in
heaven. He could not see why the air should not be inhabited when there
were stars in the ether and fish in the sea as well as other animals
upon land.[1594] Indeed he argued that it would be absurd that the
element which was essential for the vitality even of land and aquatic
animals should have no living beings of its own. That these spirits of
the air must be invisible did not trouble him, since the human soul is
also invisible.
[Sidenote: Interpretation of dreams.]
Of Philo’s five books on dreams only two are extant. They suffice to
show, however, that he accepted the art of divination from dreams. Of
dreams he distinguished three varieties: those direct from God which
require no interpretation; those in which the dreamer’s mind moves
in unison with the world soul, and which are neither entirely clear
nor yet very obscure—an instance is Jacob’s vision of the ladder; and
third, those in which the mind is moved by a prophetic frenzy of its
own, and which require the science of interpretation—such dreams were
Joseph’s concerning his brothers, and those of the butler and the baker
at Pharaoh’s court.[1595]
[Sidenote: Politics akin to magic.]
The recent war and its accompaniments and sequels have brought home
to some the conviction that our modern civilization is after all
not vastly superior to that of some preceding ages. To those who
still imagine that because modern science has freed us from much
past superstition concerning nature, we are therefore free from
political fakirs, from social absurdities, and from fallacious
procedure and reasoning in many departments of life, the reading may
be recommended of a passage in Philo’s treatise on dreams,[1596] in
which he classifies the art of politics along with that of magic. He
compares Joseph’s coat of many colors to “the much-variegated web of
political affairs” where along with “the smallest possible portion of
truth” falsehoods of every shade of plausibility are interwoven; and
he compares politicians and statesmen to augurs, ventriloquists, and
sorcerers, “men skilful in juggling and in incantations and in tricks
of all kinds, from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to
escape.” He adds that Moses very naturally represented Joseph’s coat as
blood-stained, since all statecraft is tainted with wars and bloodshed.
[Sidenote: A thought repeated by Moses Maimonides and Albertus Magnus.]
Twelve centuries later we find Philo’s association of politicians with
magicians repeated by his compatriot Moses Maimonides in the _More
Nevochim_ or _Guide for the Perplexed_,[1597] a work which appeared
almost immediately in Latin translation and from which this very
passage is cited by Albertus Magnus in his discussion of divination by
dreams.[1598] There are some men, says Albert, in whom the intellect
is abundant and active and clear. Such men are akin to the superior
substances, that is, to the angels and stars, and therefore Moses of
Egypt, _i.e._, Maimonides, calls them sages. But there are others
who, according to Albert, confound true wisdom with sophistry and are
content with mere probabilities and imaginations and are at home in
“rhetorical and civil matters.” Maimonides, however, described this
class a little differently, saying that in them the imaginative faculty
is preponderant and the rational faculty imperfect. “Whence arises
the sect of politicians, of legislators, of diviners, of enchanters,
of dreamers, ... and of prestidigiteurs who work marvels by strange
cunning and occult arts.”[1599]
CHAPTER XV
THE GNOSTICS
Difficulty in defining Gnosticism—Magic and astrology in
Gnosticism—Simon Magus as a Gnostic—Simon’s Helen—The number thirty
and the moon—Ophites and Sethians—A magical diagram—Employment
of names and formulae—Seven metals and planets—Magic of Simon’s
followers—Magic of Marcus in the Eucharist—Other magic and occult
lore of Marcus—Name and number magic—The magic vowels—Magic of
Carpocrates—The Abraxas and the number 365—Astrology of Basilides—_The
Book of Helxai_—Epiphanius on the Elchasaites—_The Book of the Laws
of Countries_—Personality of Bardesanes—Sin possible for men, angels,
and stars—Does fate in the astrological sense prevail?—National
laws and customs as a proof of free will—_Pistis-Sophia_; attitude
to astrology—“Magic” condemned—Power of names and rites—Interest
in natural science—“Gnostic gems” and astrology—The planets in
early Christian art—Gnostic amulets in Spain—Syriac Christian
charms—Priscillian executed for magic—Manichean manuscripts—The
Mandaeans.
[Sidenote: Difficulty in defining Gnosticism.]
Gnosticism[1600] is not easy to define and the term Gnostic appears
to have been applied to a great variety of sects with a confusing
diversity of beliefs. Many of the constituents and roots at least of
Gnosticism were older than Christianity, and it is now the custom to
associate the Gnosis or superior knowledge and revelation, which gives
the movement its name, not with Greek philosophy or mysteries but
with oriental speculation and religions. Anz[1601] has been impressed
by its connection with Babylonian star-worship; Amélineau[1602] has
urged its debt to Egyptian magic and religion; Bousset[1603] has
argued for Persian origins. The main features of the great oriental
religions which swept westward over the Roman Empire were shared by
Gnosticism: the redeemer god, even the great mother goddess conception
to some extent, the divinely revealed mysteries, the secret symbols,
the dualism, and the cosmic theory. Gnosticism as it is known to us,
however, is more closely connected with Christianity than with any
other oriental religion or body of thought, for the extant sources
consist almost entirely either of Gnostic treatises which pretend to be
Christian Scriptures and were almost entirely written in Coptic in the
second or third century of our era,[1604] or of hostile descriptions of
Gnostic heresies by the early church fathers. However, the philosopher
Plotinus also criticized the Gnostics, as we have seen.
[Sidenote: Magic and astrology in Gnosticism.]
What especially concerns our investigation is the great use made, or
said to be made, by the Gnostics of sacred formulae, symbols, and names
of demons, and the prevalence among them of astrological theory as
shown by their widespread notion of the seven planets as the powers
who have created our inferior and material world and who rule over
its affairs. Gnosticism was deeply influenced by, albeit it to some
extent represents a reaction against, the Babylonian star-worship
and incantation of spirits. The seven planets and the demons occupy
an important place in Gnostic myth because they intervene between
our world and the world of supreme light, and their spheres must be
traversed—much as in the _Book of Enoch_ and Dante’s _Paradiso_—both
by the redeeming god in his descent and return and by any human soul
that would escape from this world of fate, darkness, and matter. What
encouragement there is for such views in the canonical Scriptures
themselves may be inferred from the following passage in which Christ
foretells His second coming: “Immediately after the tribulation of
those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her
light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, _and the powers of the
heavens shall be shaken_. And then shall appear _the sign_ of the Son
of man _in heaven_; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn,
and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with
power and great glory. And He shall send His angels with a great sound
of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four
winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”[1605] But in order to pass
the demons and the spheres of the planets, who are usually represented
as opposed to this, one must, as in the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_,
know the passwords, the names of the spirits, the sacred formulae, the
appropriate symbols, and all the other apparatus suggestive of magic
and necromancy which forms so large a part of the _gnosis_ that gives
its name to the system. This will become the more apparent from the
following particular accounts of Gnostic sects and doctrines found
in the works of the Christian fathers and in the scanty remains of
the Gnostics themselves. The philosopher Plotinus we have already
heard charge the Gnostics with resort to magic and sorcery, and with
ascribing evil and fatal influence to the stars. At the same time we
shrewdly suspect that Gnosticism has been made a scapegoat for the sins
in these regards of both early Christianity and pagan philosophy.
[Sidenote: Simon Magus as a Gnostic.]
Simon Magus, of whose magical exploits as recorded by many a Christian
writer we shall treat in another chapter, is also represented by
the fathers as holding Gnostic doctrine, although some writers have
contended that Simon the magician named in _Acts_ was an entirely
different person from Simon the heretic and author of _The Great
Declaration_.[1606] Simon declared himself the Great Power of God, or
the Being who was over all, who had appeared in Samaria as the Father,
in Judea as the Son, and to other nations as the Holy Spirit.[1607] In
the _Pseudo-Clementines_ Simon is represented as arguing against Peter
in characteristically Gnostic style that “he who framed the world is
not the highest God, but that the highest God is another who alone is
good and who has remained unknown up to this time.”[1608] According
to Epiphanius Simon claimed to have descended from heaven through the
planetary spheres and spirits in the manner of the Gnostic redeemer.
He is quoted as saying, “But in each heaven I changed my form in
accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I might
escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the Thought,
who is none other than she who is likewise called Prounikon and the
Holy Spirit.” Epiphanius further informs us that Simon believed in a
plurality of heavens, assigned certain powers to each firmament and
heaven, and applied barbaric names to these spirits or cosmic forces.
“Nor,” adds Epiphanius, “can anyone be saved unless he learns this
mystic lore and offers such sacrifices to the Father of all through
these archons and authorities.”[1609]
[Sidenote: Simon’s Helen.]
The fathers tell us that Simon went about with a woman called Helena
or Helen, who Justin Martyr says had formerly been a prostitute.[1610]
Simon is said to have called her the mother of all, through whom God
had created the angels and aeons, who in their turn had formed the
world and men. These cosmic powers had then, however, cast her down
to earth, where she had been confined in various successive human and
animal bodies. She seems to have obtained her name of Helen from the
fact that it was for her that the Trojan war had been fought, an event
which Simon seems to have subjected to much allegorical interpretation.
He also spoke of Helen as “the lost sheep,” whom he, the Great Power,
had descended from heaven to release from the bonds of the flesh. She
was that Thought or Holy Spirit which we have heard him say he came
down to recover. Simon’s Helen also corresponds to Pistis-Sophia, who
in the extant Gnostic work named after her descends through the twelve
aeons, deceived by a lion-faced power whom they have formed to mislead
her, and then reascends by the aid of Jesus or the true light. It
seems fairly evident that the fathers[1611] have taken literally and
travestied by a scandalous application to an actual woman a beautiful
Gnostic myth or allegory concerning the human soul. At the same time
Simon’s Helen reminds us of Jesus’s relations with the woman taken in
adultery, the woman of Samaria, and Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene, it
may be noted, in the Gnostic writing, _Pistis-Sophia_, takes a rôle
superior to the twelve disciples, a fact of which Peter complains to
his Lord more than once. But Simon’s Helen was that spirit of truth
which lies latent in the human mind and which he endeavored to release
by means of the philosophy, astrology, and magic of his time. May
modern scientific method prove more successful in setting the prisoner
free!
[Sidenote: The number thirty and the moon.]
We find in the _Pseudo-Clementines_ other details concerning Simon and
Helen which bring out the astrological side of Gnosticism. We are told
that John the Baptist had thirty disciples, a number suggestive of
the days of the moon and also of the thirty aeons of the Gnostics of
whom we elsewhere hear a great deal.[1612] But the revolution of the
moon does not occupy thirty full days, so that we are not surprised to
learn that one of these disciples was a woman and furthermore that she
was the very Helen of whom we have been speaking. At least, she is so
called in the _Homilies_ of the Pseudo-Clement; in the _Recognitions_
she is actually called Luna or the Moon.[1613] After the death of John
the Baptist Simon by his magic power supplanted Dositheus as leader
of the thirty, and then fell in love with Luna and went about with
her, proclaiming that she was Wisdom or Truth, “brought down ... from
the highest heavens to this world.”[1614] The number thirty is again
associated with Simon and Dositheus in a curiously insistent, although
apparently unconscious, manner by Origen, who in one passage of his
_Reply to Celsus_, written in the first half of the third century,
expresses doubt whether thirty followers of Simon, the Samaritan
magician, can be found in all the world, and in a second passage, while
asserting that “Simonians are found nowhere throughout the world,” adds
that of the followers of Dositheus there are now not more than thirty
in all.[1615]
[Sidenote: Ophites and Sethians.]
Similar to Simon’s account of the heavens and of his descent through
them were the teachings of the Ophites and Sethians who, according
to Irenaeus,[1616] held that Christ “descended through the seven
heavens, having assumed the likeness of their sons, and gradually
emptied them of their power.” These heretics also represented the
“heavens, potentates, powers, angels, and creators as sitting in
their proper order in heaven, according to their generation, and as
invisibly ruling over things celestial and terrestrial.” All ruling
spirits were not invisible, however, since the Ophites and Sethians
identified with the seven planets their Holy Hebdomad, consisting of
Ialdabaoth, Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaus (or, Adonai), Eloeus, Oreus, and
Astanphaeus,—names often employed in the Greek magical papyri,[1617]
in medieval incantations, and in the Jewish Cabbala. The Ophites and
Sethians further asserted that when the serpent was cast down into
the lower world by the Father, he begat six sons who, with himself,
constitute a group of seven corresponding and in contrast to the Holy
Hebdomad which surround the Father. They are the seven mundane demons
who are ever hostile to humanity. The Sethians of course took their
name from Seth, son of Adam, who in the middle ages was regarded
sometimes, like Enoch, as the especial recipient of divine revelation
and as the author of sacred books. The historian Josephus states in his
_Jewish Antiquities_ that Seth and his descendants discovered the art
of astronomy and that one of the two pillars on which they recorded
their findings was still extant in his time, the first century.[1618]
Under the caption, _Sethian Tablets of Curses_, Wünsch has published
some magical imprecations scratched on lead tablets between 390 and 420
A. D. at Rome.[1619] Eight revelations ascribed to Adam and Seth are
also extant in Armenian.[1620]
[Sidenote: A magical diagram.]
In Origen’s _Reply to Celsus_ is described a mystic diagram with
details redolent of magic and astrological necromancy,[1621] which
Celsus had laid to the charge of Christians generally but which Origen
declares is probably the product of the “very insignificant sect called
Ophites.” Origen himself has seen this diagram or one something like
it, and assures his readers that “we know the depth of these unhallowed
mysteries,” but he declares that he has never met anybody anywhere
who put any faith in this diagram. Obviously, however, such a diagram
would not have been in existence if no one had ever had faith in it.
Furthermore, its survival into Origen’s time, when he asserts that men
had ceased to use it, is evidence of the antiquity of the sect and
the superstition. In this diagram ten distinct circles were united
by a single circle representing the soul of all things and called
Leviathan. Celsus spoke of the upper circles, of which at least some
were in colors, as “those that are above the heavens.” On these were
inscribed such words and phrases as “Father and Son,” “Love,” “Life,”
“Knowledge,” and “Understanding.” Then there were “the seven circles of
archontic demons,” who are probably to be connected with the spheres
of the seven planets. These seven ruling demons were represented by
animal heads or figures, somewhat resembling the symbols of the four
evangelists to be seen in the mosaics at Ravenna and elsewhere in
Christian art. The angel Michael was depicted by a sort of chimaera,
the words of Celsus being, “The goat was shaped like a lion”; Suriel,
by a bull; Raphael, by a dragon; Gabriel, by an eagle; Thautabaoth, by
a bear; Erataoth, by a dog; and Thaphabaoth or Onoel, by an ass. The
diagram was divided by a thick black line called Gehenna and beneath
the lowest circle was placed “the being named Behemoth.” There was also
“a square pattern” with inscriptions concerning the gates of paradise,
a flaming circle with a flaming sword as its diameter guarding the
tree of knowledge and of life, “a barrier inscribed in the shape of a
hatchet,” and a rhomboid with the words, “The foresight of wisdom.”
Celsus further mentioned a seal with which the Father impresses the
Son, who says, “I have been anointed with white ointment from the tree
of life,” and seven angels who contend with the seven ruling demons for
the soul of the dying body.
[Sidenote: Employment of names and formulae.]
Origen further informs us of the forms of salutation to each ruling
spirit employed by “those sorcerers,” as they pass through “the fence
of wickedness” or the gate to the realm of each spirit. The names of
the spirits are now given as Ialdabaoth, who is the lion-like archon
and with whom the planet Saturn is in sympathy, Iao or Jah, Sabaoth,
Adonaeus, Astaphaeus, Aloaeus or Eloaeus, and Horaeus. The following
is an example of the salutations or invocations addressed to these
spirits: “Thou, O second Iao, who shinest by night, who art the ruler
of the secret mysteries of Son and Father, first prince of death, and
portion of the innocent, bearing now thine own beard as symbol, I am
ready to pass through thy realm, having strengthened him who is born of
thee by the living word. Grace be with me; Father, let it be with me!”
Origen also states that the makers of this diagram have borrowed from
magic the names Ialdabaoth, Astaphaeus, and Horaeus, while the other
four are names of God drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures.
[Sidenote: Seven metals and planets.]
It is worth noting that immediately before this account of the diagram
Celsus had described similar Persian mysteries of Mithras, in which
seven heavens through which the soul has to pass were arranged in an
ascending scale like a ladder.[1622] Each successive heaven was entered
by a gate of a metal corresponding to the planet in question, lead
for Saturn, tin for Venus, copper for Jupiter, iron for Mercury, a
mixed metal for Mars, silver for the moon, and gold for the sun. This
association of metals and planets became a common feature of medieval
alchemy. At the same time the passage is said to be our chief literary
source for the mysteries of Mithras.[1623]
[Sidenote: Magic of Simon’s followers.]
The Simonians, according to Irenaeus, were as addicted to magic
as their founder had been, employing exorcisms and incantations,
love-philters and enchantments, familiar spirits and “dream-senders.”
“And whatever other curious arts may be resorted to are eagerly
employed by them.” Menander, the immediate successor of Simon in
Samaria, was “a perfect adept in the practice of magic” and taught
that by means of it one could overcome the angels who had created this
world.[1624] In a treatise on rebaptism, falsely ascribed to Cyprian
but very likely contemporary with him, it is stated that the Simonians
regard their baptism as superior to that of orthodox Christians,
because when they descend into the water fire appears upon its surface.
The writer thinks that this is done by some trick, or that there is
some natural explanation of it, or that they merely imagine that
they see a flame on the water, or that it is the work of some evil
one and of magic power.[1625] Epiphanius states that Simon employed
such obscene substances as _semen_ and _menstruum_ in his magic,[1626]
but this seems to be a slander, at least against Gnosticism, since
in a passage of the Gnostic _Book of the Saviour_, adjoined to the
_Pistis-Sophia_, Thomas asks Jesus what shall be the punishment of men
who eat “_semen maris et menstruum feminae_” mixed with lentils, saying
as they do so, “We believe in Esau and Jacob,” and is told that this
is the worst of sins and that the souls of those committing it will be
absolutely blotted out.[1627]
[Sidenote: Magic of Marcus in the Eucharist.]
Next to Simon Magus, Marcus was the Gnostic and heretic most notorious
as a practitioner of the magic arts, as Irenaeus states at the close of
the second century, and Hippolytus and Epiphanius repeat in the third
and fourth centuries respectively.[1628] In performing the Eucharist he
would change white wine placed in three wine cups into three different
colors, one blood-red, one purple, and one dark blue, according to
Epiphanius, while Irenaeus and Hippolytus more vaguely state, although
they lived closer to Marcus’s time, that he gave the wine a purple
or reddish hue as if it had been changed into blood, an alteration
which Marcus himself regarded as a manifestation of divine grace.
Epiphanius attributes the change to an incantation muttered by Marcus
while pretending to perform the Eucharist. Hippolytus, who ascribes
Marcus’s feats partly to sleight-of-hand and partly to demons, in this
case charges that he furtively dropped some drug into the wine. Marcus
was also accustomed to fill a large cup from a smaller one so that it
would overflow, a marvel which Hippolytus again tries to account for
by stating that “very many drugs, when mingled in this way with liquid
substances” temporarily increase their volume, “especially when diluted
in wine.”
[Sidenote: Other magic and occult lore of Marcus.]
Irenaeus, who is quoted verbatim by Epiphanius, further states that
Marcus had a familiar demon by whose aid he was able to prophesy, and
that he pretended to confer this gift upon others. He also accuses
Marcus of seducing women by means of philters and love potions which he
compounded. Hippolytus does not make these charges, but unites with the
others in describing at length Marcus’s theory of mystic names and his
symbolical and mystical interpretation of the letters of the alphabet
and of numbers. Marcus made various calculations based upon the number
of letters in a name, the number of letters in the name of each letter,
and so on. When Christ, whose ineffable name has thirty letters, said,
“I am Alpha and Omega,” He was believed by Marcus to have displayed
the dove, whose number is 801. These reveries “are mere bits,” as
Hippolytus says, of astrological theory and Pythagorean philosophy.
We shall find them perpetuated in the middle ages in the method of
divination known as the Sphere of Pythagoras.
[Sidenote: Name and number magic.]
Such symbolism and mysticism concerning numbers and letters seldom
indeed remain a matter of mere theory but readily lend themselves
to operative magic. Thus Hippolytus can speak in the same breath of
“magical arts and Pythagorean numbers” or tell that Pythagoras himself
“also touched on magic, as they say, and himself discovered an art of
physiognomy, laying down as a basis certain numbers and measures.” Or
note a third passage where Hippolytus is discussing Egyptian theology
based on the theory of numbers.[1629] After treating of the monad,
duad, and enneads, of the four elements in pairs, of the 360 parts of
the circle, of “ascending and beneficent and masculine names” which
end in odd numbers, and of feminine and malicious and descending names
which terminate in even numbers, Hippolytus continues, “Moreover, they
assert that they have calculated the word, ‘Deity.’ Now this name
is an even number, and they write it down and attach it to the body
and accomplish cures by it. In the same way an herb which terminates
in this number is bound around the body and operates by reason of a
similar calculation of the number. Nay, even a doctor cures the sick by
such calculations.“ Similarly Censorinus states that the number seven
is ascribed to Apollo and used in the cure of bodily ills, while nine
is associated with the Muses and heals mental diseases.[1630] But to
return to Gnosticism.
[Sidenote: The magic vowels.]
The seven vowels were much employed by the Gnostics, undoubtedly as
symbols for the seven planets and the spirits associated with them, but
as symbols possessed of magic power as well as of mystic significance.
“The Saviour and His disciples are supposed in the midst of their
sentences to have broken out in an interminable gibberish of only
vowels; magic spells have come down to us consisting of vowels by the
fourscore; on amulets the seven vowels, repeated according to all sorts
of artifices, form a very common inscription.”[1631] As the seven
planets made the music of the spheres, so the seven vowels seem to have
represented the musical scale, “and many a Gnostic sheet of vowels is
in fact a sheet of music.”[1632]
[Sidenote: Magic of Carpocrates.]
Other heretics with Gnostic views who were accused of magic by the
fathers were the followers of Carpocrates, who employed incantations
and spells, philters and potions, who attracted spirits to themselves
and made light of the cosmic angels, and who pretended to have great
power over all things so that they were able by their magic to satisfy
every desire.[1633]
[Sidenote: The Abraxas and the number 365.]
Saturninus and Basilides were charged with “practicing magic, and
employing images, incantations, invocations, and every other kind of
curious art.” They also believed in a supreme power named Abrasax or
Abraxas, whose number was 365; and they contended that there were 365
heavens and as many bones in the human body; “and they strive to set
forth the names, principles, angels, and powers of the 365 imagined
heavens.”[1634]
[Sidenote: Astrology of Basilides.]
Hippolytus gives further indication of the astrological leanings of
Basilides, who held that each thing had its own particular time, and
supported his view by citing the _Magi_ gazing wistfully at the star
of Bethlehem and the remark of Christ Himself, “Mine hour is not yet
come.”[1635] I suppose that by this Hippolytus means to suggest that
Basilides held the astrological doctrine of elections; Basilides
further affirmed, according to Hippolytus, that Jesus was “mentally
preconceived at the time of the generation of the stars; and of the
complete return to their starting point of all the seasons in the
vast conglomeration,” that is, at the end of the astronomical _magnus
annus_, variously reckoned as of 36,000 or 15,000 years in duration.
[Sidenote: _The Book of Helxai._]
In his _Refutation of all Heresies_[1636] Hippolytus tells of an
Alcibiades from Apamea in Syria who in his time brought to Rome a
book supposed to contain revelations made to a holy man, Elchasai or
Helxai, by an angel ninety-six miles in height and from sixteen to
twenty-four miles in breadth and leaving a footprint fourteen miles
long. This angel was the Son of God, and was accompanied by a female
of corresponding size who was the Holy Spirit. This apparition and
revelation was accompanied by a preaching of a new remission of sins
in the third year of Trajan’s reign, at which time we are led to
suppose that the _Book of Helxai_ came into existence. It imposed
secrecy upon those initiated into its mysteries. The sect, according
to Hippolytus, were much given to magic, astrology, and the number
mysticism of Pythagoras. The Elchasaites employed incantations and
formulae to cure persons bitten by mad dogs or afflicted with disease.
In such cases and also in the case of rebaptism for the remission of
sins it was customary with them to invoke or adjure “seven witnesses,”
not however in this case the planets, but “the heaven, and the water,
and the holy spirits, and the angels of prayer, and the oil (or, the
olive), and the salt, and the earth.” Hippolytus declares that their
formulae of this sort were “very numerous and very ridiculous.” They
dipped consumptives and persons possessed by demons in cold water forty
times in seven days. They believed in the astrological doctrine of
elections, since their sacred book warned them not to baptize or begin
other important undertakings upon those days which were governed by
the evil stars. They also seem to have predicted political events from
the stars, foretelling that three years after Trajan’s subjugation of
the Parthians “war rages between the impious angels of the northern
(constellations), and on this account all kingdoms of impiety are in
confusion.”
[Sidenote: Epiphanius on the Elchasaites.]
In the next century Epiphanius adds one or two further details to
Hippolytus’ account of the Elchasaites. Besides the list of seven
witnesses already given he mentions another slightly different one:
salt, water, earth, wheat, heaven, ether, and wind. He also tells
of two sisters in the time of Constantine who were supposed to be
descendants of Helxai. One of them was still alive the last Epiphanius
knew, and crowds followed “this witch” to collect the dust of her
footprints or her spittle to use in curing diseases.[1637]
[Sidenote: _The Book of the Laws of Countries._]
We possess an important document for the attitude of early Christianity
and Gnosticism towards astrology in _The Dialogue concerning Fate_ or
_The Book of the Laws of Countries_ of Bardesanes or Bardaisan.[1638]
The complete Syriac text is extant;[1639] there is a long and somewhat
modified extract adopted from it in the Latin _Recognitions_ of
Clement,[1640] and briefer fragments in the Greek fathers. Strictly
speaking, the text seems to be written by some follower of Bardesanes
named Philip who represents his master as discussing the problem of
human free will with Avida, himself, and other disciples. The bulk of
the treatise is in any case put in Bardesanes’ mouth and it probably
reflects his views with fair accuracy. Eusebius ascribed it to
Bardesanes himself.
[Sidenote: Personality of Bardesanes]
Bardesanes (154-222 A. D.) was born in Edessa. He spent most of his
life in Mesopotamia but for a time went to Armenia as a missionary.
His many works in Syriac included apologies for Christianity, attacks
upon heresies, and numerous hymns, but the only work extant is the
treatise we are about to examine, with the possible exception of _The
Hymn of the Soul_[1641] ascribed to him and contained in the Syriac
_Acts of St. Thomas_. His doctrines were regarded by Ephraem Syrus and
others as tainted with Gnostic heresy. He is often represented as a
follower of Valentinus, but the ancient authorities, such as Epiphanius
and Eusebius, disagree as to whether he degenerated from orthodoxy to
Valentinianism or reformed in the opposite direction. In the dialogue
which we consider he is represented as a Christian, but his remarks
have often been thought to have a Gnostic flavor. F. Nau, however, has
argued that he was not a Gnostic and that the statements in question in
the dialogue can be explained as purely astrological.[1642]
[Sidenote: Sin possible for men, angels, and stars.]
The treatise opens with the query, why did not God make men so that
they could not sin? The reply of course is that moral freedom for good
or evil is a greater gift of God than compulsory morality. By virtue of
his individual freedom of action man is equal to the angels, some of
whom, too, have sinned with the daughters of men and fallen, and is
superior even to the sun, moon, and signs of the zodiac which are fixed
in their courses. The stars, however, as in _The Book of Enoch_, “are
not absolutely destitute of all freedom” and will be held responsible
at the day of judgment. Presently some of them are called evil.
[Sidenote: Does fate in the astrological sense prevail?]
After some discussion whether man does wrong from his nature, the
treatise turns to the question, how far are men controlled by fate,
that is, by the power of the seven planets in accordance with the
doctrine of the Chaldeans, which is the term here usually employed for
astrologers. Some men attack astrology as “a lying invention” and hold
that the human will is free and that such evils as man cannot avoid are
due to chance or to divine punishment but not to the stars. Between
these extremes Bardesanes takes middle ground. He believes that there
is such a force in the stars, whom he refers to as Potentates and
Governors, as the fate of which the astrologers speak, but that this
fate evidently does not rule everything, since it is itself established
by the one God who imposed upon the stars and elements that motion in
conformity with which “intelligences undergo change when they descend
to the soul, and souls undergo change when they descend to bodies,” a
statement which appears to have a Gnostic flavor. This fate furthermore
is limited by nature on the one hand and human free will on the other
hand. The vital processes and periods which are common to all men,
such as birth, generation, child-bearing, eating, drinking, old age,
and death, Bardesanes regards as governed by nature. “The body,” he
says, “is neither hindered nor helped by fate in the several acts it
performs,” a view which most astrologers would probably not accept.
On the contrary, in Bardesanes’ opinion wealth and honors, power and
subjection, sickness and health, are controlled by fate which often
disturbs the regular course of nature. This is because in genesis
or the nativity the stars, some of which work with and some against
nature, are in conflict. In short, some stars are good and some are
evil.
[Sidenote: National laws and customs as a proof of free will.]
If nature is thus often upset by the stars, fate in its turn may be
resisted and overpowered by man’s exercise of will. This assertion
Bardesanes proceeds to prove by the argument which has given to the
dialogue the title, _The Book of the Laws of the Countries_, and which
we find much repeated in subsequent writers. Briefly it is that in
various nations certain laws are enforced upon, or customs observed by
all the people alike regardless of their diverse individual horoscopes.
In illustration of this are listed various prohibitions and practices
fondly supposed by Bardesanes and his audience to characterize the
Seres, Brahmans, Persians, Geli, Bactrians, Arabs, Britons, Parthians,
Amazons, and other peoples. Savage tribes are mentioned among whom
there are no artists, bankers, perfumers, musicians, and poets to
fit the nativities decreed by the constellations for certain times.
Bardesanes is aware of the astrological theory of seven zones or
climes, by which the science of individual horoscopes is corrected
and modified, but he contends that there are many different laws in
each of these zones, and would be, even if the number were raised to
twelve according to the number of the signs or to thirty-six after
the decans. He also contends that men retain their laws or customs
when they migrate to other climes, and adduces the fidelity of Jews
and Christians to the commandments of their respective religions as
a further illustration of the triumph of free will over the stars.
He concedes, however, as before that “in every country and in every
nation there are rich and poor, and rulers and subjects, and people
in health and those who are sick, each one according as fate and his
nativity have affected him.” Incidentally to the foregoing discussion
it is affirmed that the astrology of Egypt and that of the Chaldeans
in Babylon are identical. At the close of the treatise is appended a
note stating that Bardesanes estimated the duration of the world at six
thousand years on the basis of sixty as the least number of years in
which the seven planets complete an even number of revolutions.
[Sidenote: The _Pistis-Sophia_: attitude to astrology.]
If the work ascribed to Bardesanes is not certainly Gnostic, the
_Pistis-Sophia_ is, and we turn next to it and first of all to its
attitude towards astrology. This treatise is extant in a Coptic codex
of the fifth or sixth century;[1643] the Greek original text was
probably written in the second half of the third century. It gives
the revelations made by Jesus to his disciples after He had ascended
to heaven and returned again to them. When He ascended through the
heavens, He changed the fatal influence of the lords of the spheres and
made the planets turn to the right for six months of the year, whereas
before they had faced the left continually.[1644] In a long passage
near the close of the _Pistis-Sophia_ proper[1645] Jesus asserts the
absolute control of human destiny hitherto by “the rulers of the fate”
and describes how they fashion the new soul, control the process of
generation and of the formation of the child in the womb, and decree
every event of life down to the day and manner of death. Only by the
Gnostic key to the mysteries can one escape their control.[1646] In the
following _Book of the Saviour_, moreover, even the finding of this
key is subjected to astral control, since a constellation is described
under which all souls descending to this world will be just and good
and will discover the mysteries of light.[1647]
[Sidenote: “Magic” condemned.]
The _Pistis-Sophia_ assumes the usual attitude of condemnation of magic
so-called. Among the evils which Jesus warns his followers to renounce
are superstition and invocations and drugs or magic potions.[1648]
One object of his reducing by one-third the power of the lords of the
spheres when He ascended through the heavens was that men might not
henceforth invoke them by magic rites for evil purposes. Marvels may
still, however, be accomplished by “those who know the mysteries of the
magic of the thirteenth aeon” or power above the spheres.[1649]
[Sidenote: Power of names and rites.]
But while magic is renounced, great faith is shown in the power of
names and rites. Thus after a description of the dragon of outer
darkness and the twelve main dungeons into which it divides and the
animal faces and names of the twelve rulers thereof, who evidently
represent in an inaccurate fashion the signs of the zodiac, it is added
that even unrepentant sinners, if they know the mystery of any one of
these twelve names, can escape from these dungeons.[1650] In the _Book
of the Saviour_ Jesus not only utters several long lists of strange
and presumably magic words by way of invocation to the Power or powers
above, but these are accompanied by careful observance of ceremonial.
On both occasions Jesus and the disciples are clad in linen.[1651] In
the first case the disciples are carefully grouped with reference to
the points of the compass, towards which Jesus turns successively as He
utters the magic words standing at a sacrificial altar. The result of
this ceremony and invocation was that the heavens were displaced and
the earth left behind and that Jesus and the disciples found themselves
in the region of mid-air. Before uttering the other invocation Jesus
commanded that fire and vine branches be brought, placed an offering
on the flame, and carefully arranged two vessels of wine, two cups of
water, and as many pieces of bread as there were disciples. In this
case the object was to remit the sins of the disciples. In the _Book of
Jeû_ in the Bruce Papyrus there is a perfect riot of such magic names
and invocations, seals and diagrams, and accompanying ceremonial.[1652]
[Sidenote: Interest in natural science.]
The interest of the Gnostics in natural science is seen in the list of
things that will be known by one who has penetrated all the mysteries
and fully entered upon the inheritance of the kingdom of light. Not
only will he understand why there is light and darkness, and why sin
and vice exist and life and death, but also why there are reptiles and
wild beasts and why they shall be destroyed, why there are birds and
beasts of burden, why there are gems and precious metals, why there are
brass, iron and steel, lead, glass, wax, herbs, waters, “and why the
wild denizens of the sea.” Why there are four points of the compass,
why demons and men, why heat and cold, stars, winds, and clouds, frost,
snow, planets, aeons, decans, and so on and so forth.[1653]
[Sidenote: “Gnostic gems” and astrology.]
King has shown that many of the so-called “Gnostic gems” are purely
astrological talismans and that “only a very small minority amidst
their multitude present any traces of the influence of Christian
doctrines.”[1654] Many are for medicinal or magical purposes rather
than of a religious character. Some nevertheless are engraved with
the truly Gnostic figure of Pantheus Abraxas which King regards as
“the actual invention of Basilides.” Another common symbol, borrowed
from Egypt, is the Agathodaemon, which by the third century had become
the popular designation of the hooded snake of Egypt, or Chnuphis or
Chneph, a great serpent with a lion’s head encircled by a crown of
seven or twelve rays, representing the planets or signs. Often the
seven Greek vowels are placed at the tips of the seven rays. On the
obverse of the gem the letter “s” is engraved thrice and traversed by a
straight rod, a design probably meant to depict a snake twisting about
a wand. We are reminded, not only with King of the club of Aesculapius,
but of Aaron’s rod, the magicians of Pharaoh, and the serpent lifted
up in the wilderness; also of Lucian’s tale of the pretended discovery
of the god Asclepius by the pseudo-prophet, Alexander. At least one
“Gnostic amulet” has on the back the legend “Iao Sabao” (th).[1655]
[Sidenote: The planets in early Christian art.]
The influence of astrology may be seen in other and more certainly
genuine works of early Christian art than many of the so-called Gnostic
gems. On a lamp in the catacombs Christ is depicted as the good
shepherd with a lamb on His shoulder. Above His head are the seven
planets, although the sun and moon are shown again at either side, and
about His feet press seven lambs, perhaps an indication that He is
freeing the peoples of the seven climes from the fatal influence of the
stars. In the _Poemander_ attributed to Hermes it is stated that there
are seven peoples from the seven planets. On a gem of perhaps the third
century a similar scene is engraved except that the sun and moon are
not shown apart from the seven planets, and that the lamb on Christ’s
shoulders is counted as one of the seven, so that there are but six at
His feet.[1656]
[Sidenote: Gnostic amulets in Spain.]
“Gnostic amulets and other works of art” are occasionally found in
Spain, especially the Asturian northwest which remained Christian at
the time of the Mohammedan conquest of the rest of the peninsula. One
ring is inscribed with the sentence, “Zeus, Serapis, and Iao are one.”
On another octagonal ring are Greek letters signifying the Gnostic
_Anthropos_ or father of wisdom. A stone is carved with a candelabrum
and the seven planets, “the sacred hebdomad of the Chaldeans.”[1657]
[Sidenote: Syriac Christian charms.]
Gollancz in his _Selection of Charms from Syriac Manuscripts_ presents
a number of spells and incantations which, whether any of them are
Gnostic or not, certainly seem to be Christian, since they mention
the divine persons of Christianity, Mary, and various Biblical
characters.[1658]
[Sidenote: Priscillian executed for magic.]
At the close of the fourth century the views of the Gnostics were
revived in Gaul and Spain by Priscillian, who seems to have been
much influenced by astrology and who was put to death at Treves in
385 A. D. on a charge of magic. He confessed under torture, but was
afterwards thought innocent. We are not told, however, what the magical
practices were of which he was accused.[1659] Both Sulpicius Severus
and Isidore of Seville[1660] state that he was accused of _maleficium_,
which should mean witchcraft, sorcery, or magical operations with the
intent to injure someone. But further details are wanting, except that
Sulpicius calls Priscillian a man “more puffed up than was right with
the knowledge of profane things, and who was further believed to have
practiced magic arts since adolescence,” while Isidore states that
Bishop Itacius (Ithaicus), who was largely responsible for pushing the
charges against Priscillian, showed in a book which he wrote against
Priscillian’s heresy that “a certain Marcus of Memphis, most learned
in magic art, was a disciple of Mani and master of Priscillian.”
Priscillian himself states in his extant works that Itacius had accused
him of magic in 380. As the final trial proceeded, Itacius gave way
as accuser to a public prosecutor (_fisci patronus_) who continued
the case on behalf of the emperor Maximus who seems to have had his
eye upon Priscillian’s large fortune. St. Martin of Tours in vain
obtained from Maximus a promise that Priscillian should not be put to
death.[1661] But his execution brought his persecutor Itacius into such
bad odor that he was excommunicated and condemned to exile for the rest
of his life.
[Sidenote: Manichean Manuscripts]
We have just heard that Priscillian was taught by a disciple of
Mani, while Ephraem Syrus states that Bardesanes was the teacher of
Mani. Augustine in his youth, when a follower of the Manicheans, had
been devoted to astrology. This connection between Gnosticism and
astrology and Manicheism has been further attested by the fragments of
Manichean manuscripts recently discovered in central Asia.[1662] In
them the sun-god and moon-god and five other planets play a prominent
part. Besides the five planets we have five elements—ether, wind,
light, fire, and water—five plants, five trees, and five beings with
souls—man, quadrupeds, reptiles, aquatic, and flying animals. The five
gods or luminous bodies are represented as good forces who imprisoned
five kinds of demons; but the devil had his revenge by imprisoning
luminous forces in man, whom he made a microcosm of the universe. And
whereas the good spirit had created sun and moon, the devil formed male
and female. The great sage of beneficent light then appeared in the
world and brought forth from his own five members five liberators—pity,
contentment, patience, wisdom, and good faith—corresponding to the
five elements just as among the Christians we shall find four virtues
and four elements. Then ensued the struggle of the old man with the
new man. Although we are commonly told that idolatry and magic were
strictly prohibited by the Manicheans, the envoy of light is in one
text represented as “employing great magic prayers” in his effort to
deliver living beings. When men eat living beings, they offend against
the five gods, the earth dry and moist, the five orders of animate
beings, the five different herbs and five trees. Other numbers than
five appear in these Manichean fragments: four seals of light and four
praises, four courts with iron barriers; three vestments and three
wheels and three calamities; ten vows and ten layers of heavens above,
and eight layers of earth beneath; twelve great kings and twelve
evil natures; thirteen great luminous forces and thirteen parts of
the carnal body and thirteen vices,—elsewhere fourteen parts; fifteen
enumerations of sins for which forgiveness is sought; fifty days in the
year to be observed; and so on.
[Sidenote: The Mandaeans.]
A sect derived either from Gnosticism or from common sources
seems still to exist in the case of the Mandaeans of southern
Babylonia.[1663] They believe that the earth and man were formed by a
Demiurge, who corresponds to the Ialdabaoth of the Ophites, and who was
aided by the spirits of the seven planets. They divide the history of
the world into seven ages and represent Jesus Christ as a false prophet
and magician produced by the planet Mercury. The lower world consists
of four vestibules and three hells proper and has seven iron and seven
golden walls. A dying Mandaean is clothed in a holy dress of seven
pieces. The spirits of the planets, however, are represented as evil
beings, and the first two of three sets of progeny borne by the spirit
of hell fire were the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac.
The influence of these two numbers, seven and twelve, may be further
seen in the regulation that a candidate for the priesthood should be
at least nineteen years old and have had twelve years of previous
training, which we infer would normally begin when he reached his
seventh year and not before. Other prominent numbers in Mandaean lore
are five,[1664] perhaps indicative of the planets other than sun and
moon, and three hundred and sixty, suggestive of the number of degrees
in the circle of the zodiac. Thus the main manifestations of the primal
light are five, and the third generation produced by the spirit of
hell fire was of like number. The number of aeons is often stated as
three hundred and sixty, and the delivering deity or Messiah of the
Mandaeans is said to have sent forth that number of disciples before
his return to the realm of light. We hear of yet other numbers, such
as 480,000 years for the duration of the world, 60,000, and 240, but
these too are commensurate, if not identical, with astrological periods
such as those of conjunctions and the _magnus annus_. A peculiarity of
Mandaean astronomy and astrology is that the other heavenly bodies are
all believed to rotate about the polar star. Mandaeans always face it
when praying; their sanctuaries are built so that persons entering face
it; and even the dying man is placed so that his feet point and eyes
gaze in its direction. Like the Gnostics, the Mandaeans invoke by many
strange names their spirits and aeons who are divided into numerous
orders. Their names for the planets seem to be of Babylonian origin.
Passages from their sacred books are recited like incantations and are
considered more effective in danger and distress than prayer in the
ordinary sense of the word. Such recitations are also employed to aid
the souls of the dead to ascend through various stages or prisons to
the world of light. Earthenware vessels have recently been brought to
light with Mandaean inscriptions and incantations to avert evil.[1665]
CHAPTER XVI
THE CHRISTIAN APOCRYPHA
Magic in the Bible—Apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy—Question of
their date—Their medieval influence—Resemblances to Apuleius and
Apollonius in the Arabic _Gospel of the Infancy_—Counteracting magic
and demons—Other miracles and magic by the Christ child—Sometimes with
injurious results—Further marvels from the _Pseudo-Matthew_—Learning
of the Christ child—Other charges of magic against Christ and
the apostles—The _Magi_ and the star—Allegorical zoology of
Barnabas—Traces of Gnosticism in the apocryphal Acts—Legend of St.
John—Legend of St. Sousnyos—Old Testament Apocrypha of the Christian
era.
[Sidenote: Magic in the Bible.]
It is hardly necessary to rehearse here in detail the numerous
allusions to, prohibitions of, and descriptions of the practice
of magic, witchcraft, and astrology, enchantments and exorcisms,
divination and interpretation of dreams, which are to be found
scattered through the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Such
passages had a profound influence upon Christian thought on such themes
in the early church and during the middle ages, and we shall have
occasion to mention many, if not most, of such scriptural passages, in
connection with this later discussion of them by the church fathers and
others. For instance, Pharaoh’s magicians and their contests with Moses
and Aaron; Balaam and his imprecations and enchantments and prediction
that a star would come out of Jacob and a scepter out of Israel; the
witch of Endor or ventriloquist and her invocation of what seemed to be
the ghost of Samuel; the repeated use of the numbers seven and twelve,
suggestive of the planets and signs of the zodiac, as in the twelve
cakes of showbread and candlestick with seven branches; the dreams
and interpretation of dreams of Joseph and Daniel, not to mention
the former’s silver divining cup;[1666] the wise men who saw Christ’s
star in the east; Christ’s own allusion to the shaking of “the powers
of the heavens” and the gathering of His elect from the four winds
at His second coming; the accusation against Christ that He cast out
demons by the aid of the prince of demons; the eclipse of the sun at
the time of the crucifixion; the adventures of the apostles with Simon
Magus, with Elymas the sorcerer, and with the damsel possessed with a
spirit of divination who brought her master much gain by soothsaying;
the burning of their books of magic by the vagabond Jewish exorcists;
the prohibitions of heathen divination and witchcraft by the Mosaic
law and by the prophets; the penalties prescribed for sorcerers in
the Book of Revelation; at the same time the legalized practice of
similar superstitions, such as the ordeal to test a wife’s faithfulness
by making her drink “the bitter water that causeth the curse,”[1667]
the engraved gold plate upon the high priest’s forehead,[1668] or the
use of Paul’s handkerchief and underwear to cure the sick and dispel
demons; the promise to believers in the closing verses or appendix of
_The Gospel according to St. Mark_ that they shall cast out devils,
speak with new tongues, handle serpents and drink poison without
injury, and cure the sick by laying on of hands. The foregoing scarcely
exhaust the obvious allusions or analogies to astrology and other magic
arts in the Bible, to say nothing of less explicit passages[1669]
which were later taken to justify certain occult arts, as Exodus XIII,
9, to support chiromancy, and the Gospel of John XI, 9, to support
the astrological doctrine of elections. Suffice it for the present to
say that the prevailing atmosphere of the Bible is one of prophecy,
vision, and miracle, and that with these go, like the obverse face of a
coin or medal, their inevitable accompaniments of divination, demons,
and magic.
[Sidenote: Apocryphal gospels of the infancy.]
This is also the case in apocryphal literature of the New Testament
which is now so much less familiar and accessible especially to English
readers,[1670] but which had wide currency in the early Christian and
medieval periods. We may begin with the apocryphal gospels and more
particularly those dealing with the infancy and childhood of Christ.
Of these two are believed to date from the second century, namely,
the Gospel of James or “Gospel of the Infancy” (_Protoevangelium
Iacobi_)[1671] and the Gospel of St. Thomas, which is mentioned
by Hippolytus. However, he cites a sentence which is not in the
present text—of which the manuscripts are scanty and for the most
part of late date[1672]—and the gospel as we have it is not Gnostic,
as he says it is, so that our version has probably been altered
by some Catholic.[1673] Later in date is the Latin gospel of the
Pseudo-Matthew—perhaps of the fourth or fifth century—and the Arabic
Gospel of the Infancy, which is believed to be a translation from a
lost Syriac original. We are the worst off of all for manuscripts of
its text and apparently there is no Latin manuscript of it now extant,
although a Latin text has reached us through the printed editions.
Tischendorf was, however, “unwilling to omit in this new collection
of the apocryphal gospels that ancient and memorable monument of the
superstition of oriental Christians,” and for the same reason we
shall survey its medley of miracle and magic in the present chapter.
Speaking of the flight into Egypt this gospel says, “And the Lord Jesus
performed a great many miracles in Egypt which are not found recorded
either in the Gospel of the Infancy or in the Perfect Gospel.”[1674]
Tischendorf noted the close resemblance of its first nine chapters to
the Gospel of James and of chapters 36-55 to the Gospel of Thomas,
while the intervening chapters “contain especially fables of the sort
you may fittingly call oriental, filled with allusions to Satan and
demons and sorceries and magic arts.”[1675] We find, however, the same
sort of fables in the other three apocryphal gospels; there are simply
more of them in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy. It appears to be a
compilation and may embody other earlier sources no longer extant as
well as passages from the pseudo-James and pseudo-Thomas.
[Sidenote: Question of their date.]
There is a tendency on the part of orthodox Christian scholars to
defer the writing of apocryphal works to as late a date as possible,
and they seem to have a notion that they can save the credibility or
purity of the miracles of the New Testament[1676] by representing such
miracles as those recorded of the infancy of Christ as the inventions
of a later age. And it is probably true that all these marvels were not
the invention of a single century but of a succession of centuries.
On the other hand, I know of no reason for thinking Christians of the
first century any less credulous than Christians of the fifth century;
it was not until the latter century that Pope Gelasius’ condemnation
of apocryphal books was drawn up, but apocryphal books had long been
in existence before that time; nor for thinking the Christians of
the thirteenth century any more credulous than those of the other
two centuries. It is only in our own age that Christians have become
really critical of such matters. Moreover, these unacceptable miracles,
whenever they were invented, were presumably invented by and accepted
by Christians, who must bear the discredit for them. Whatever the
century was, the same men believed in them who believed in the miracles
recorded in the New Testament. If the plant has flowered into such rank
superstition, can the original seed escape responsibility? The Arabic
Gospel of the Infancy is no doubt an extreme instance of Christian
credence in magic, but it is an instance that cannot be overlooked,
whatever its date, place, or language.
[Sidenote: Their medieval influence.]
These apocryphal gospels of the Infancy, which are in part extant
only in Latin, continued to be influential in the medieval period.
At the beginning of it we find included in Pope Gelasius’ list of
apocryphal works, published at a synod at Rome in 494,[1677] besides
apocryphal gospels of Matthew and of Thomas—which last we are told,
“the Manicheans use”—a _Liber de infantia Salvatoris_ and a _Liber de
nativitate Salvatoris et de Maria et obstetrice_. There are numerous
manuscripts of such gospels in the later medieval centuries but it
would not be safe to attempt to identify or classify them without
examining each in detail. As Tischendorf said, the Latins do not seem
to have long remained content with mere translations of the Greek
pseudo-gospel of James but combined the stories told there with others
from the Pseudo-Thomas or other sources into new apocryphal treatises.
Thus the extant Latin apocrypha in no case reproduce the Gospel of
James accurately but rather are imitated after it, and include some of
it, omit some of it, embellish some of its tales, and add to it.[1678]
Mâle states in his work on religious art in France in the thirteenth
century that _The Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew_ and _The Gospel
of Nicodemus_ or _Acts of Pilate_ were the two apocryphal gospels
especially used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[1679]
[Sidenote: Resemblances to Apuleius and Apollonius in the Arabic Gospel
of the Infancy.]
That the fables of the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy were at least
not fresh from the orient is indicated by the way in which some of
the incidents in the stories of Apuleius and Apollonius of Tyana are
closely paralleled.[1680] In the parlor of a well furnished house where
lived two sisters with their widowed mother stood a mule caparisoned
in silk and with an ebony collar about his neck, “whom they kissed and
were feeding.”[1681] He was their brother, transformed into a mule by
the sorcery of a jealous woman one night a little before daybreak,
although all the doors of the house were locked at the time. “And we,”
they tell a girl who had been instantly cured of leprosy by use of
perfumed water in which the Christ child had been washed and who had
then become the maid-servant of the virgin Mary,[1682] “have applied to
all the wise men, magicians, and diviners in the world, but they have
been of no service to us.”[1683] The girl recommends them to consult
Mary, who restores their brother to human form by placing the Christ
child upon his back. This romantic episode is then brought to a fitting
conclusion by the marriage of the brother to the girl who had assisted
in his restoration to his right body. As the demon, who in the form of
an artful beggar was causing the plague at Ephesus and whom Apollonius
had stoned to death, turned at the last moment into a mad dog, so
Satan, when forced by the presence of the Christ child to leave the
boy Judas, ran away like a mad dog.[1684] The reviving of a corpse by
an Egyptian prophet in the _Metamorphoses_ in order that the dead man
may tell who murdered him is paralleled in both the Arabic Infancy and
the gospels of Thomas and the Pseudo-Matthew by the conduct of Jesus
when accused of throwing another boy down from a house-top. The text
reads: “Then the Lord Jesus going down stood over the dead boy and said
with a loud voice, ‘Zeno, Zeno, who threw you down from the house-top?’
Then the dead boy answered, ‘Lord, thou didst not throw me down, but
so-and-so did.’”[1685]
[Sidenote: Counteracting magic and demons.]
Many were the occasions upon which the Christ child or his mother
counteracted the operations of magic or relieved persons who were
possessed by demons. Kissing him cured a bride whom sorcerers had made
dumb at her wedding,[1686] and a bridegroom who was kept by sorcery
from enjoying his wife was cured of his impotence by the mere presence
of the holy family who lodged in his house for the night.[1687] Mary’s
pitying glance was sufficient to expel Satan from a woman possessed by
demons.[1688] Another upright woman who was often vexed by Satan in
the form of a serpent when she went to bathe in the river,[1689] which
reminds one somewhat of Olympias and Nectanebus,[1690] was permanently
cured by kissing the Christ child. And a girl, whose blood Satan
used to suck, miraculously discomfited him when he appeared in the
shape of a huge dragon by putting upon her head and about her eyes a
swaddling cloth of Jesus which Mary had given to her. Fire then went
forth and was scattered upon the dragon’s head and eyes, as from the
blinking eyes of the artful beggar who caused the plague in the _Life
of Apollonius of Tyana_, and he fled in a panic.[1691] A priest’s
three-year-old son who was possessed by a great multitude of devils,
who uttered many strange things, and who threw stones at everybody, was
likewise cured by placing on his head one of Christ’s swaddling clothes
which Mary had hung out to dry. In this case the devils made their
escape through his mouth “in the shape of crows and serpents.”[1692]
Such marvels may offend modern taste but have their probable prototype
in the miracles wrought by use of Paul’s handkerchief and underwear in
the New Testament and illustrate, like the placing of spittle on the
eyes of the blind man, the great healing virtue then ascribed to the
perspiration and other secretions and excretions of the human body.
[Sidenote: Other miracles and magic by the Christ child.]
Sick children as well as lepers were cured by the water in which Jesus
had bathed or by wearing coats made of his swaddling clothes,[1693]
while the child Bartholomew was snatched from the very jaws of death
by the mere smell of the Christ child’s garments the moment he was
placed on Jesus’ bed.[1694] On the road to Egypt is a balsam which
was produced “from the sweat which ran down there from the Lord
Jesus.”[1695] The Christ child cured snake-bite, in the case of his
brother James by blowing on it, in the case of his playfellow, Simon
the Canaanite, by forcing the serpent who had stung him to come out of
its hole and suck all the poison from the wound, after which he cursed
the snake “so that it immediately burst asunder and died.”[1696] When
the boy Jesus took all the cloths waiting to be dyed with different
colors in a dyer’s shop and threw them into the furnace, the dyer began
to scold him for this mischief, but the cloths all came out of the
desired colors.[1697] Jesus also miraculously remedied the defective
carpentry of Joseph, who had worked for two years on a throne for
the king of Jerusalem and made it too short. Jesus and Joseph took
hold of the opposite sides and pulled the throne out to the required
dimensions.[1698]
[Sidenote: Sometimes with injurious results.]
The usual result of the Christ child’s miracles was that all the
bystanders united in praising God. But when his little playmates went
home and told their parents how he had made his clay animals walk and
his clay birds fly, eat, and drink, their elders said, “Take heed,
children, for the future of his company, for he is a sorcerer; shun
and avoid him, and from henceforth never play with him.”[1699] Indeed,
if the theory of the fathers is correct that the surest hall-mark by
which divine miracles may be distinguished from feats of magic is that
the former are never wrought for any evil end while the latter are, it
must be admitted that his contemporaries were sometimes justified in
suspecting the Christ child of resort to magic. After his playmates
had been thus forbidden to associate with Jesus, they hid from him in
a furnace, and some women at a house near by told him that there were
not boys but kids in the furnace. Jesus then actually transformed them
into kids who came skipping forth at his command.[1700] It is true that
he soon changed them back into human form, and that the women worshiped
Christ and asserted their conviction that he was “come to save and not
to destroy.” But on several subsequent occasions Jesus is represented
in the apocryphal gospels of the infancy as causing the death of his
playmates. When another boy broke a little fish-pool which Jesus had
constructed on the Sabbath day, he said to him, “In like manner as this
water has vanished, so shall thy life vanish,” and the boy presently
died.[1701] When a third boy ran into Jesus and knocked him down, he
said, “As thou hast thrown me down, so shalt thou fall, nor ever rise;”
and that instant the boy fell down and died.[1702] When Jesus’ teacher
started to whip him, his hand withered and he died. After which we
are not surprised to hear Joseph say to Mary, “Henceforth we will not
allow him to go out of the house; for everyone who displeases him is
killed.”[1703]
[Sidenote: Further marvels from the _Pseudo-Matthew_.]
As has been indicated in the footnotes many of the foregoing marvels
are recounted in the Pseudo-Matthew and Latin Gospel of Thomas as
well as in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy. The Pseudo-Matthew also
tells how lions adored the Christ child and were bade by him to go in
peace.[1704] And how he “took a dead child by the ear and suspended him
from the earth in the sight of all. And they saw Jesus speaking with
him like a father with his son. And his spirit returned unto him and
he lived again. And all marveled thereat.”[1705] When a rich man named
Joseph died and was lamented, Jesus asked his father Joseph why he did
not help his dead namesake. When Joseph asked what there was that he
could do, Jesus replied, “Take the handkerchief which is on your head
and go and put it over the face of the corpse and say to him, ‘May
Christ save you.’” Joseph followed these instructions except that he
said, “_Salvet te Iesus_,” instead of “_Salvet te Christus_,” which
was possibly the reason why the dead man upon reviving asked, “Who is
Jesus?”[1706]
[Sidenote: Learning of the Christ child.]
While no very elaborate paraphernalia or ceremonial were involved in
the miracles ascribed to the Christ child in the Arabic Gospel of the
Infancy, it is perhaps worth noting that he was already possessed of
all learning and nonplussed his masters, when they tried to teach him
the alphabet, by asking the most abstruse questions. And when he
appeared before the doctors in the temple, he expounded to them not
only the books of the law,[1707] but natural philosophy, astronomy,
physics and metaphysics, physiology, anatomy, and psychology. He is
represented as telling them “the number of the spheres and heavenly
bodies, as also their triangular, square, and sextile aspect; their
progressive and retrograde motion; their twenty-fourths and sixtieths
of twenty-fourths” (perhaps corresponding to our hours and minutes!)
“and other things which the reason of man had never discovered.”
Furthermore, “the powers also of the body, its humors and their
effects; also the number of its members, and bones, veins, arteries,
and nerves; the several constitutions of the body, hot and dry, cold
and moist, and the tendencies of them; how the soul operates upon
the body; what its various sensations and faculties are; the faculty
of speaking, anger, desire; and lastly, the manner of the body’s
composition and dissolution, and other things which the understanding
of no creature had ever reached.”[1708] It may be added that in the
apocryphal epistles supposed to have been interchanged between Christ
and Abgarus, king of Edessa, that monarch writes to Christ, “I have
been informed about you and your cures, which are performed without the
use of herbs and medicines.”[1709]
[Sidenote: Other charges of magic against Christ and the apostles.]
Jesus is again accused of magic in _The Gospel of Nicodemus_ or _Acts
of Pontius Pilate_, where the Jews tell Pilate that he is a conjurer.
After Pilate has been warned by his wife, the Jews repeat, “Did we not
say unto thee, He is a magician? Behold, he hath caused thy wife to
dream.”[1710] In the _Acts of Paul and Thecla_, to which Tertullian
refers and which are now seen to be an excerpt from the apocryphal
_Acts of Paul_, discovered in 1899 in a Coptic papyrus,[1711] the mob
similarly cries out against Paul, “He is a magician; away with him.”
In the _Acts of Peter and Andrew_[1712] they are both accused of
being sorcerers by Onesiphorus, who also, however, denies that Peter
can make a camel go through the eye of a needle. Nor is he satisfied
when the feat is successfully performed with a needle and camel of
Peter’s selection, but insists upon its being repeated with an animal
and instrument of his own selection. Onesiphorus also has “a polluted
woman” ride upon his camel’s back, apparently with the idea that this
will break the magic spell. But Peter sends the camel through the
eye of the needle, “which opened up like a gate,” as successfully as
before, and also back again through it once more from the opposite
direction.
[Sidenote: The _Magi_ and the star.]
Some details are added by the apocrypha to the account of the star at
Christ’s birth. The Arabic Gospel states that Zoroaster (Zeraduscht)
had predicted the coming of the _Magi_, that Mary gave the _Magi_ one
of Christ’s swaddling clothes, that they were guided on their homeward
journey by an angel in the form of the star which had led them to
Bethlehem, and that after their return they found that the swaddling
cloth would not burn in fire.[1713] The _Epistle of Ignatius to the
Ephesians_ states that this star shone with a brightness far exceeding
all others, filling men with fear, and that with its coming the power
of magic was destroyed and the new kingdom of God ushered in.[1714]
[Sidenote: Allegorical zoology of Barnabas.]
In the apocryphal _Epistle of Barnabas_ occurs some of that allegorical
zoology which we are apt to associate especially with the Physiologus.
In its ninth chapter the hyena and weasel are adduced as examples of
its contention that the Mosaic distinction between clean and unclean
animals has a spiritual meaning. Thus the command not to eat the hyena
means not to be an adulterer or corrupter of others, for the hyena
changes its sex annually. The weasel which conceives with its mouth
signifies persons with unclean mouths. In the _Acts of Barnabas_ he
cures the sick of Cyprus by laying a copy of the _Gospel of Matthew_
upon their bodies.[1715]
[Sidenote: Traces of Gnosticism in the apocryphal Acts.]
If we turn again to the various apocryphal Acts, where we have already
noted charges of magic made against the apostles, we may find traces
of gnosticism which have already been noted by Anz.[1716] In the _Acts
of Thomas_ the Holy Ghost is called the pitying mother of seven houses
whose rest is the eighth house of heaven. In the _Acts of Philip_
that apostle prays, “Come now, Jesus, and give me the eternal crown
of victory over every hostile power ... Lord Jesus Christ ... lead me
on ... until I overcome all the cosmic powers and the evil dragon who
opposes us. Now therefore Lord Jesus Christ make me to come to Thee
in the air.” _The Acts of John_, too, speak of overcoming fire and
darkness and angels and demons and archons and powers of darkness who
separate man from God.
[Sidenote: Legend of John.]
We deal in another chapter with the struggle of the apostles with Simon
Magus as recounted in the apocryphal _Acts of Peter and Paul_, and with
similar legends of the contests of other apostles with magicians. Here,
however, we may mention some of the marvels in the apocryphal legend
of St. John, supposed to have been written by his disciple Procharus
and “which deluded the Greek Church by its air of sincerity and its
extreme precision of detail,”[1717] although it does not seem to have
reached the west until the sixteenth century. John is represented
as drinking without injury a poison which had killed two criminals,
and as reviving two corpses without going near them by directing an
incredulous pagan to lay his cloak over them. A Stoic philosopher had
persuaded some young men to embrace the life of poverty by converting
their property into gems and then pounding the gems to pieces. John
made the criticism that this wealth might have better been distributed
among the poor, and when challenged to do so by the Stoic, prayed to
God and had the gems made whole again. Later when the young men longed
for their departed wealth, he turned the pebbles on the seashore into
gold and precious stones, a miracle which is said to have persuaded the
medieval alchemists that he possessed the secret of the philosopher’s
stone.[1718] At any rate Adam of St. Victor in the twelfth century
wrote the following lines concerning St. John in a chant to be used in
the church service:
Cum gemmarum partes fractas
Solidasset, has distractas
Tribuit pauperibus;
Inexhaustum fert thesaurum
Qui de virgis fecit aurum,
Gemmas de lapidibus.[1719]
[Sidenote: Legend of St. Sousnyos.]
The brief legend of St. Sousnyos, which Basset has included in his
edition of Ethiopian Apocrypha,[1720] is all magic, beginning with
an incantation or magic prayer against disease and demons. There is
also a Slavonic version. This Sousnyos is presumably the same as
the Sisinnios who is said by the author of the apocryphal _Acts of
Archelaus_,[1721] forged about 330-340 A. D., to have abandoned Mani,
embraced Christianity, and revealed to Archelaus secret teachings which
enabled him to triumph over his adversary.
[Sidenote: Old Testament apocrypha of the Christian era.]
While on the subject, mention may be made of two works which properly
belong to the apocrypha of the Old Testament, but which first appear
during the Christian era and so fall within our period. _The Ascension
of Isaiah_,[1722] of which the old Latin version was printed at Venice
in 1522, and which dates back to the second century, is something like
the _Book of Enoch_, describing Isaiah’s ascent through the seven
heavens and vision of the mission of Christ. In the _Book of Baruch_,
of which the original version was written in Greek by a Christian of
the third or fourth century,[1723] the most interesting episode is the
magic sleep into which, like Rip Van Winkle, Abimelech falls during the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans. In the legend of Jeremiah
the prophet’s soul is absent from his body on one occasion for three
days, while on another occasion he dresses up a stone to impersonate
himself before the populace who are trying to stone him to death, in
order that he may gain time to make certain revelations to Abimelech
and Baruch. When he has had his say, the stone asks the people why they
persist in stoning it instead of Jeremiah, against whom they then turn
their missiles.[1724]
Such is no exhaustive listing but rather a few examples of the
encouragement given to belief in magic by the Christian Apocrypha.
CHAPTER XVII
THE RECOGNITIONS OF CLEMENT AND SIMON MAGUS
The Pseudo-Clementines—Was Rufinus the sole medieval version?—Previous
Greek versions—Date of the original version—Internal
evidence—Resemblances to Apuleius and Philostratus—Science and
religion—Interest in natural science—God and nature—Sin and
nature—Attitude to astrology—Arguments against genethlialogy—The
virtuous Seres—Theory of demons—Origin of magic—Frequent accusations
of magic—Marvels of magic—How distinguish miracle from magic?—Deceit
in magic—Murder of a boy—Magic is evil—Magic is an art—Other accounts
of Simon Magus: Justin Martyr to Hippolytus—Peter’s account in the
_Didascalia et Constitutiones Apostolorum_—Arnobius, Cyril, and
Philastrius—Apocryphal _Acts of Peter and Paul_—An account ascribed to
Marcellus—Hegesippus—A sermon on Simon’s fall—Simon Magus in medieval
art.
“_The Truth herself shall receive thee a wanderer and a stranger, and
enroll thee a citizen of her own city._”
—_Recognitions_ I, 13.
[Sidenote: The Pseudo-Clementines.]
The starting-point and chief source for this chapter will be the
writings known as the _Pseudo-Clementines_ and more particularly
the Latin version commonly called _The Recognitions_. We shall then
note other accounts of its villain-hero, Simon Magus, in patristic
literature.[1725] The _Pseudo-Clementines_, as the name implies, are
works or different versions of one work ascribed to Clement of Rome,
who is represented as writing to James, the brother of the Lord, an
account of events and discussions in which he and the apostle Peter had
participated not long after the crucifixion. This Pseudo-Clementine
literature has a double character, combining romantic narrative
concerning Peter, Simon Magus, and the family of Clement with long,
argumentative, didactic, and doctrinal discussions and dialogues in
which the same persons participate but Peter takes the leading and
most authoritative part. Not only the authorship, origin, and date,
but even the title or titles and the make-up and arrangement of the
various versions and their original are doubtful or disputed matters.
The versions now extant and published seem by no means to have been
the only ones, but we will describe them first. In Greek we have the
version known as _The Homilies_ in twenty books, in which the didactic
element preponderates. It is extant in only two manuscripts of the
twelfth and fourteenth centuries at Paris and Rome,[1726] but is also
preserved in part in epitomes. Different from it is the Latin version
in which the narrative element plays a greater part.
[Sidenote: Was Rufinus the sole medieval version?]
This Latin version, now usually referred to as _The Recognitions_,
because the main point in its plot is the successive bringing together
again of, and recognition of one another by, the members of a family
long separated, is the translation made by Rufinus, who is last heard
from in 410. It is usually divided into ten books. Numerous manuscripts
of this version attest its popularity and influence in the middle
ages, when we early find Isidore of Seville quoting Clement several
times as an authority on natural science.[1727] Arevalus, however,
thought that Isidore used some other version of the Pseudo-Clementines
than that of Rufinus,[1728] and in the medieval period another title
was common, namely, _The Itinerary of Clement_, or _The Itinerary of
Peter_.[1729] William of Auvergne, for instance, in the first half of
the thirteenth century cites the _Itinerarium Clementis_ or “Book of
the disputations of Peter against Simon Magus.”[1730] This _Itinerary
of Clement_ also heads the list of works condemned as apocryphal by
Pope Gelasius at a synod at Rome in 494,[1731] a list reproduced by
Vincent of Beauvais in his _Speculum naturale_ in the thirteenth
century[1732] and in the previous century rather more accurately by
Hugh of St. Victor in his _Didascalicon_.[1733] In all three cases
the full title is given in practically the same words, “The Itinerary
by the name of the Apostle Peter which is called Saint Clement’s, an
apocryphal work in eight books.”[1734] Here we encounter a difficulty,
since as we have said _The Recognitions_ are in ten books. We find,
however, that in another passage[1735] Vincent correctly cites the
ninth book of _The Recognitions_ as Clement’s ninth book, and that the
number of books into which _The Recognitions_ is divided varies in the
manuscripts, and that they, too, more often call it _The Itinerary of
Clement_ or even apply other designations. Rabanus Maurus in the ninth
century quotes an utterance of the apostle Peter from _The History of
Saint Clement_, but the passage is found in _The Recognitions_.[1736]
Vincent of Beauvais also quotes “the blessed apostle Peter in a
certain letter attached to _The Itinerary of Clement_.” No letter by
Peter is prefaced to the printed text of _The Recognitions_, nor does
Rufinus mention such a letter, although he does speak in his preface of
a letter by Clement which he has already translated elsewhere. Prefixed
to the printed _Homilies_, however, and in the manuscripts found also
with _The Recognitions_, are letters of Peter and Clement respectively
to James. But the passage quoted by Vincent does not occur in either,
but comes from the tenth book of _The Recognitions_.[1737] It would
seem, therefore, despite variations in the number of books and in the
arrangement of material, that the Latin version by Rufinus was the only
one current in the middle ages, but we cannot be sure of this until all
the extant manuscripts have been more carefully examined.[1738]
[Sidenote: Previous Greek versions.]
The version by Rufinus differed from previous ones not only in being in
Latin but also in various omissions which he admits he made and perhaps
other changes to suit it to his Latin audience. That there was already
more than one version in Greek he shows in his preface by describing
another text than that upon which his translation or adaptation was
based. Neither of these two Greek texts appears to have been the same
as the present _Homilies_.[1739] Yet _The Homilies_ were apparently in
existence at that time, since a Syriac manuscript of 411 A. D. contains
four books of _The Homilies_ and three of _The Recognitions_,[1740]
thus in itself furnishing an illustration of the ease with which new
versions might be compounded from old. Both _The Homilies_ and _The
Recognitions_ as they have reached us would seem to be confusions and
perversions of this sort, as their incidents are obviously not arranged
in correct order. For instance, when the story of _The Recognitions_
begins Christ is still alive and reports of His miracles are reaching
Rome; the same year Barnabas pays a visit to Rome and Clement almost
immediately follows him back to Syria, making the passage from Rome to
Caesarea in fifteen days;[1741] but on his arrival there he meets Peter
who tells him that “a week of years” have elapsed since the crucifixion
and of other intervening events involving a considerable lapse of time.
Or again, in the third book of _The Recognitions_ Simon is said to have
sunk his magical paraphernalia in the sea and gone to Rome, but as late
as the tenth and last book we find him still in Antioch and with enough
paraphernalia left to transform the countenance of Faustus.
[Sidenote: Date of the original version.]
Yet this late and misarranged version on which Rufinus bases his
text must have been already in existence for some time, since he
confesses that he has been a long while about his translation. The
virgin Sylvia who “once enjoined it upon” him to “render Clement into
our language” is now spoken of as “of venerable memory,” and it is to
Bishop Gaudentius that Rufinus “after many delays” in his old age “at
length” presents the work. We might thus infer that the original and
presumably more self-consistent Pseudo-Clementine narrative, which
Rufinus evidently does not use, must date back to a much earlier
period. We hear from other sources of _The Circuits_ or _Periodoi of
Peter_ by Clement, but this may have been the version translated by
Rufinus.[1742] Conservative Christian scholars regard as the oldest
unmistakable allusion to the Pseudo-Clementines that by Eusebius early
in the fourth century, who, without giving any specific titles, speaks
of certain “verbose and lengthy writings, containing dialogues of Peter
forsooth and Apion,” which are ascribed to Clement but are really
of recent origin. As for the date of the original work from which
_Homilies_ and _Recognitions_ are derived,[1743] from 200 to 280 A. D.
is suggested by Harnack and his school, who take middle ground between
the extreme contentions of Hilgenfeld and Chapman. But the original
Pseudo-Clement is supposed to have utilized _The Teachings of Peter_
and _The Acts of Peter_, which Waitz would date between 135 and 210 A.
D.[1744]
[Sidenote: Internal evidence.]
The work itself, even in the perverted form preserved by Rufinus,
makes pretensions to the highest Christian antiquity. Not only is it
addressed to James and put into the mouth of Clement, but Paul is never
mentioned, and no book of the New Testament is cited by name, while
sayings of Jesus are cited which are not found in the Bible. Christ is
often alluded to in a veiled and mystic fashion as “the true prophet,”
who had appeared aforetime to Abraham and Moses, and interesting and
vivid incidental glimpses are given of what purports to be the life
of an early Christian community and perhaps is that of the Ebionites,
Essenes, or some Gnostic sect. Emphasis is laid upon the purifying
power of baptism, upon Peter’s practice of bathing early every morning,
preferably in the sea or running water, upon secret prayers and
meetings, a separate table for the initiated, esoteric discussions of
religion at cock-crow and in the night, and upon power over demons. All
this may be mere clever invention, but there certainly is an atmosphere
of verisimilitude about it; and it is rather odd that a later writer
should be “very careful to avoid anachronisms,” in whose account as it
now stands are such glaring chronological confusions as those already
noted concerning Clement’s voyage to Caesarea and Simon’s departure for
Rome. But, as in the case of the New Testament Apocrypha, the exact
date of composition makes little difference for our purpose, for which
it is enough that the _Pseudo-Clementines_ played an important part in
the first thirteen centuries of Christian thought viewed as a whole.
Eusebius and Epiphanius may find them unpalatable in certain respects
and reject them as heretical, but Basil and Gregory utilize their
arguments against astrology. Gelasius may classify them as apocryphal,
but Vincent of Beauvais justifies a discriminating use of the
apocryphal books in general and cites this one in particular more than
once as an authority, and the incidents of its story were embodied, as
we shall see, in medieval art.
[Sidenote: Resemblances to Apuleius and Philostratus.]
The same resemblance to the works of Apuleius and Philostratus that
we noted in the case of an apocryphal gospel is observable in the
_Pseudo-Clementines_. We see in _The Recognitions_ the same mixed
interest in natural science and in magic combined with religion and
romantic incident that characterized the variegated and motley page
of the author of the _Metamorphoses_ and the biographer of Apollonius
of Tyana. It is probably only a coincidence that two of the works of
Apuleius are dedicated to a Faustinus whom he calls “my son,” while
Clement’s father is named Faustus or Faustinianus, and the legend of
Faust is believed to originate with him and the episodes in which he is
concerned.[1745] Less accidental may be the connection between Peter’s
religious sea-bathing and that purification in the sea by which the
hero of the _Metamorphoses_ began the process by which he succeeded
in regaining his lost human form. More considerable are the detailed
parallels to the work of Philostratus.[1746] Peter corresponds roughly
to Apollonius and Clement to Damis, while the wizards and _magi_ are
ably personified by the famous Simon Magus. If Apollonius abstained
from all meat and wine and wore linen garments, Peter lives upon “bread
alone, with olives, and seldom even with pot-herbs; and my dress,”
he says, “is what you see, a tunic with a pallium: and having these,
I require nothing more.”[1747] Like Philostratus the Pseudo-Clement
speaks of bones of enormous size which are still to be seen as proof
of the existence of giants in former ages;[1748] and the accounts of
the Brahmans and allusions to the Scythians in the _Life of Apollonius
of Tyana_ are paralleled in _The Recognitions_ by a series of brief
chapters on these and other strange races.[1749] Peter is, of course,
a Jew, not a Hellene like Apollonius, but in his train are men who are
thoroughly trained in Greek philosophy and capable of discussing its
problems at length. They also are not without appreciation of pagan
art and turn aside, with Peter’s consent, to visit a temple upon an
island and “to gaze earnestly” upon “the wonderful columns” and “very
magnificent works of Phidias.”[1750] Just as Apollonius knew all
languages without having ever studied them, so Peter is so filled with
the Spirit of God that he is “full of all knowledge” and “not ignorant
even of Greek learning”; but to descend from his usual divine themes to
discuss it is considered to be rather beneath him. Clement, however,
felt the need of coaching Peter up a little in Greek mythology.[1751]
This mingled attitude of contempt for “the babblings of the Greeks”
when compared to divine revelation, and of respect for Greek philosophy
when compared with anything else is, it is hardly necessary to say, a
very common one with Christian writers throughout the Roman Empire.
[Sidenote: Science and religion.]
The same attitude prevails toward natural science. At the very
beginning of the Clementines the curiosity of the ancient world in
regard to things of nature is shown by the question which someone
propounded to Barnabas when he began to preach, at Rome according to
_The Recognitions_, at Alexandria according to _The Homilies_, of the
Son of God. The heckler wanted to know why so small a creature as a
fly has not only six feet but wings in addition, while the elephant,
despite its enormous bulk, has only four feet and no wings at all.
Barnabas did not answer the question, although he asserted that he
could if he wished to, making the excuse that it was not fitting to
speak of mere creatures to those who were still ignorant of their
Creator.[1752]
[Sidenote: Interest in natural science.]
This unwillingness to discuss natural questions by no means continues
characteristic of the Clementines, however. Not only does Peter
explain to Clement the creation of the world and propound the
extraordinary[1753] doctrine that after completing the process of
creation God “set an angel as chief over the angels, a spirit over the
spirits, a star over the stars, a demon over the demons, a bird over
the birds, a beast over the beasts, a serpent over the serpents, a fish
over the fishes,” and “over men a man who is Christ Jesus.”[1754] Not
only does he later in public defend baptism with water on the ground
that “all things are produced from waters” and that waters were first
created.[1755] We also find Niceta accepting the Greek hypothesis of
four elements, of the sphericity of the universe, and of the motions
of the heavenly bodies “assigned to them by fixed laws and periods,”
citing Plato’s _Timaeus_, mentioning Aristotle’s introduction of a
fifth element,[1756] disputing the atomic theory of Epicurus,[1757]
and alluding to “mechanical science.”[1758] He further discusses the
generation of plants, animals, and human beings as evidences of divine
design and providence,[1759] in which connection he collects a number
of examples of marvelous gen eration of animals such as moles from
earth and vipers from ashes, and affirms that “the crow conceives
through the mouth and the weasel generates through the ear.”[1760]
Simon Magus declared himself immortal on the theory, which we shall
find cropping out again in the thirteenth century in Roger Bacon and
Peter of Abano, that his flesh was “so compacted by the power of his
divinity that it can endure to eternity.”[1761] On the other hand,
Niceta describes the action of the intestines in a fairly intelligent
manner,[1762] and tells how the blood flows like water from a fountain,
“and first borne along in one channel, and then spreading through
innumerable veins as through canals, irrigates the entire territory
of the human body with vital streams.”[1763] A little later on Aquila
gives a natural explanation of rainbows.[1764]
[Sidenote: God and nature.]
There is noticeable, it is true, a tendency, common in patristic
literature and found even among those fathers who hold the dualism
of the Manichees in the deepest detestation, to make a distinction
between God and nature and to attribute any flaws in the universe to
the latter.[1765] Niceta cannot agree with “those who speak of nature
instead of God and declare that all things were made by nature”; he
holds that God created the universe. But Aquila, who supports his
brother in the discussion, seems to think that God’s responsibility
for the universe ceased, at least in part, after it was once created.
At any rate he admits that “in this world some things are done in an
orderly and some in a disorderly fashion. Those things therefore,” he
continues, “that are done rationally, believe that they are done by
Providence; but those that are done irrationally and inordinately,
believe that they befall naturally and happen accidentally.”[1766]
[Sidenote: Sin and nature.]
But even nature sometimes rises up against the sins of mankind
according to Peter and his associates. Aquila believes that the sins
of men are the cause of pestilences;[1767] that “when chastisement
is inflicted upon men according to the will of God, he” (i. e. the
Sun, already called “that good servant” and whom the early Christians
found it difficult to cease to personify) “glows more fiercely and
burns up the world with more vehement fires”;[1768] and that “those
who have become acquainted with prophetic discourse know when and for
what reason blight, hail, pestilence, and such like have occurred
in every generation, and for what sins these have been sent as a
punishment.”[1769] Peter gives the impression that nature sometimes
acts rather independently of God in thus punishing the wicked. He says:
“But this also I would have you know, that upon such souls God does not
take vengeance directly, but His whole creation rises up and inflicts
punishments upon the impious. And although in the present world the
goodness of God bestows the light of the world and the services of the
earth alike upon the pious and the impious, yet not without grief does
the Sun afford his light and the other elements perform their services
to the impious. And, in short, sometimes even in opposition to the
goodness of the Creator, the elements are worn out by the crimes of the
wicked; and hence it is that either the fruit of the earth is blighted,
or the composition of the air is vitiated, or the heat of the sun is
increased beyond measure, or there is an excess of rain or cold.”[1770]
This is a close approach to the notion of _The Book of Enoch_ that
human sin upsets the world of nature, and an even closer approach to
the theory of the Brahmans in _The Life of Apollonius of Tyana_ that
prolonged drought is a punishment visited by the world-soul upon human
sinfulness.
[Sidenote: Attitude to astrology.]
Such vestiges of the world-soul doctrine, such a tendency to ascribe
emotion and will to the elements and planets, to personify them, and to
think of God as ruling the world indirectly through them, prepare us
to find an attitude rather favorable to astrological theory. Indeed,
in the first book of _The Recognitions_[1771] we are told in so many
words that the Creator adorned the visible heaven with stars, sun, and
moon in order that “they might be for an indication of things past,
present, and future,” and that these celestial signs, while seen by
all, are “understood only by the learned and intelligent.” Astrology is
respectfully described as “the science of mathesis,”[1772] and, as was
common in the Roman Empire, astrologers are called _mathematici_.[1773]
A defender even of the most extreme pretensions of the art is not
abused as a charlatan but is courteously greeted as “so learned a
man,”[1774] and all admire his eloquence, grave manners, and calm
speech, and accord him a respectful hearing.[1775] Astrology, far
from being regarded as necessarily contrary to religion, is thought
to furnish arguments for the existence of God, and it is said that
Abraham, “being an astrologer, was able from the rational system of the
stars to recognize the Creator, while all other men were in error, and
understood that all things are regulated by His Providence.”[1776] The
number seven is somewhat emphasized[1777] and the twelve apostles are
called the twelve months of Christ who is the acceptable year of the
Lord.[1778] Somewhat similarly the Gnostic followers of the heretic
Valentinus made much of the Duodecad, a group of twelve aeons, and
believed, according to Irenaeus, “that Christ suffered in the twelfth
month. For their opinion is that He continued to preach for one year
only after His baptism.”[1779] Peter, too, has a group of twelve
disciples.[1780] Niceta speaks of “man who is a microcosm in the great
world.”[1781] It is admitted that the stars exert evil as well as
good influence,[1782] and that the astrologer “can indicate the evil
desire which malign virtue produces.”[1783] But it is contended that,
“possessing freedom of the will, we sometimes resist our desires and
sometimes yield to them,” and that no astrologer can predict beforehand
which course we will take.
[Sidenote: Arguments against genethlialogy.]
In fine, astrology is criticized adversely only when it goes to the
length of contending that “there is neither any God, nor any worship,
neither is there any Providence in the world, but all things are done
by fortuitous chance and _genesis_”; that “whatever your _genesis_
contains, that shall befall you”;[1784] and that the constellations
force men to commit murder, adultery, and other crimes.[1785] On
this point Niceta and Aquila, and finally Clement himself, have long
discussions with an aged adept in genethlialogy which fill a large
portion of the last three books of _The Recognitions_, and include a
dozen chapters which are little more than an extract from _The Laws
of Countries_ of Bardesanes. Divine Providence and human free will
are defended, and genethlialogy is represented as an error which has
received confirmation through the operations of demons.[1786] It
is asserted that men can be kept from committing crimes by fear of
punishment and by law, even if they are naturally so inclined, and
races like the Seres (Chinese) and Brahmans are adduced as examples
of entire races of men who never commit the crimes into which men are
supposed to be forced by the constellations. The argument is also
advanced, “Since God is righteous and since He Himself made human
nature, how could it be that He should place _genesis_ in opposition to
us, which should compel us to sin, and then that He should punish us
when we do sin?”[1787] It is further charged that the constellations
are so complicated, that for any given moment one astrologer may infer
a favorable and another a disastrous influence,[1788] and that most
successful explanations of the effects of the stars are made after
the event, like dreams of which men can make nothing at the time, but
“when any event occurs, then they adapt what they saw in the dream to
what has occurred.”[1789] Finally the aged defender of _genesis_, who
believed that his own fate and that of his wife had been accurately
prescribed by their horoscopes, turns out to be Faustinianus (called
Faustus in _The Homilies_), the long-lost father of Clement, Niceta,
and Aquila; is also restored to his wife; and learns that his previous
interpretation of events from the stars was quite erroneous.[1790]
[Sidenote: The virtuous Seres.]
The ideal picture of the Seres or Chinese, “who dwell at the beginning
of the world,” which _The Recognitions_ apparently borrows from
Bardesanes, is perhaps worth repeating here as an odd admission that
a non-Christian people can attain a state of moral perfection and
sinlessness, as well as an interesting bit of ancient ethnology. “In
all that country which is very large there is neither temple nor
image nor harlot nor adulteress, nor is any thief brought to trial.
But neither is any man ever slain there.... For this reason they are
not chastened with those plagues of which we have spoken; they live
to extreme old age, and die without sickness.”[1791] Perhaps these
virtuous Seres are the blameless Hyperboreans in another guise.
[Sidenote: Theory of demons.]
Demons and angels abound in _The Recognitions_. One may be rebuked
and scourged at night by an angel of God.[1792] Peter says that every
nation has an angel, since God has divided the earth into seventy-two
sections and appointed an angel as governor and prince of each.[1793]
Once, before beginning to preach, Peter expelled demons from a number
of persons in the audience.[1794] In another passage is described
the cure of a girl of twenty-seven who for twenty years had been
vexed by an unclean spirit and had been shut up in a closet in chains
because of her violence and superhuman strength. The mere presence
of Peter put this demon to rout and the chains fell off the girl
of their own accord.[1795] Besides these personal encounters with
demons, the theory of demoniacal possession is discussed more than
once, and anything of which the author does not approve, such as the
art of horoscopes, heathen oracles, the excesses of pagan rites and
festivals, and the animal gods of the Egyptians, is attributed to
the influence of demons.[1796] One becomes susceptible to demoniacal
possession who eats meat sacrificed to idols or who merely eats and
drinks immoderately.[1797] Demons are apt to get into the very bowels
of those who frequent drunken banquets.[1798] Incontinence, too, is
accompanied by demons whose “noxious breath” produces “an intemperate
and vicious progeny.... And therefore parents are responsible for their
children’s defects of this sort, because they have not observed the law
of intercourse.”[1799] As much care should be taken in human generation
as in the sowing of crops. But while demons abound, God has given every
Christian power over them, since they may be driven out by uttering
“the threefold name of blessedness.”[1800] Moreover, “what is spoken by
the true God, whether by prophets or varied visions, is always true;
but what is foretold by demons is not always true.”[1801]
[Sidenote: Origin of magic.]
With demons is associated the origin of the magic art. “Certain angels
... taught men that demons could be made to obey man by certain
arts, that is, by magical invocations.”[1802] The first magicians
were Ham and his son Mesraim, from whom the Egyptians, Babylonians,
and Assyrians are descended, and who tried to draw sparks from the
stars[1803] but set himself on fire “and was consumed by the demon
whom he had accosted with too great importunity.”[1804] But on this
account he was called Zoroaster or “living star” after his death.
Moreover, the magic art did not perish but was transmitted to Nimrod
“as by a flash.”[1805] With this may be compared the slightly different
account of the origin of magic given by Epiphanius in the _Panarion_,
written about 374-375 A. D. Magic is older than heresy and was already
in existence before the time of Ham or Mesraim in the antediluvian
days of Jared, when it coexisted with “pharmacy,” a term here used to
cover sorcery and poisoning, licentiousness, adultery, and injustice.
After the flood Epiphanius mentions Nimrod (Νεβρώδ) as the first tyrant
and the inventor of the evil disciplines of astrology and magic. He
states that the Greeks incorrectly confuse him with Zoroaster whom they
regard as the founder of magic and astrology. According to Epiphanius,
“pharmacy” and magic passed from Egypt to Greece in the time of
Cecrops.[1806]
[Sidenote: Frequent accusations of magic.]
In _The Recognitions_ everyone, Christian, heretic, pagan, and
philosopher, condemns or professes to condemn magic, and reference
is made to the laws of the Roman emperors against it.[1807] But
Christians, pagans, and heretics, while claiming divine power and
protection for themselves, freely accuse one another of the practice
of magic. An unnamed person, by whom Paul is perhaps meant, stirs up
the people of Jerusalem to persecute the apostolic community there as
“most miserable men, who are deceived by Simon, a magician.”[1808] The
guards at the sepulcher, unable to prevent the resurrection, said that
Jesus was a magician, a charge which is repeated by one of the scribes
and by Simon Magus. Simon also calls Peter a magician on more than
one occasion.[1809] Peter, of course, makes similar charges against
Simon; he had been especially sent by James to Caesarea in order to
refute this magician who was giving himself out to be the _Stans_ or
Christ.[1810] The gods of Greek mythology, too, are accused of having
resorted to magic transformations and sorcery.[1811] Philosophy,
however, escapes the accusation of magic in _The Recognitions_,[1812]
and it was a philosopher who deterred Clement, before the latter had
become a Christian, from his plan of investigating the problem of
the immortality of the soul by hiring an Egyptian magician to evoke
a soul from the infernal regions by the art of necromancy.[1813]
The philosopher condemned such an attempt as unlawful, impious, and
“hateful to the Divinity.”[1814]
[Sidenote: Marvels of magic.]
But while magic is condemned, its great powers are admitted. Simon
Magus makes great boasts of the marvels which he can perform. These
include becoming invisible, boring through rocks and mountains as if
they were clay, passing through fire without being burned, flying
through the air, loosing bonds and barriers, transformation into animal
shapes, animation of statues, production of new plants or trees in a
moment, and growing beards upon little boys.[1815] He also asserted
that he had formed a boy by turning air into water and the water into
blood, and then solidifying this into flesh, a feat which he regarded
as superior to the creation of Adam from earth. Later Simon unmade him
and restored him to the air, “but not until I had placed his image and
picture in my bedchamber as a proof and memorial of my work.”[1816]
Not only does Simon himself make such boasts; Niceta and Aquila, who
had been his disciples before their conversion by Zaccheus, also
bear witness to his amazing feats. “Who would not be astonished at
the wonderful things which he does? Who would not think that he was
a god come down from heaven for the salvation of men?”[1817] He can
fly through the air, or so mingle himself with fire as to become one
body with it, he can make statues walk and dogs of brass bark. “Yea,
he has also been seen to make bread of stones.”[1818] When Dositheus
tried to beat Simon, the rod passed through his body as if it had
been smoke.[1819] The woman called Luna who goes about with Simon was
seen by a crowd to look out of all the windows of a tower at the same
time,[1820] an illusion possibly produced by mirrors. When Simon fears
arrest, he transforms the face of Faustinianus into the likeness of his
own, in order that Faustinianus may be arrested in his place.[1821]
[Sidenote: How distinguish miracle from magic?]
So great, indeed, are the marvels wrought by Simon and by magicians
generally that Niceta asks Peter how they may be distinguished from
divine signs and Christian miracles, and in what respect anyone sins
who infers from the similarity of these signs and wonders either that
Simon Magus is divine or that Christ was a magician. Speaking first
of Pharaoh’s magicians, Niceta asks, “For if I had been there, should
I not have thought, from the fact that the magicians did like things
(to those which Moses did), either that Moses was a magician, or that
the feats displayed by the magicians were divinely wrought?... But if
he sins who believes those who work signs, how shall it appear that
he also does not sin who has believed on our Lord for His signs and
occult virtues?” Peter’s reply is that Simon’s magic does not benefit
anyone, while the Christian miracles of healing the sick and expelling
demons are performed for the good of humanity. To Antichrist alone
among workers of magic will it be permitted at the end of the world to
mix in some beneficial acts with his evil marvels. Moreover, “by this
means going beyond his bounds, and being divided against himself,
and fighting against himself, he shall be destroyed.”[1822] Later in
_The Recognitions_, however, Aquila states that even the magic of
the present has found ways of imitating by contraries the expulsion
of demons by the word of God, that it can counteract the poisons
of serpents by incantations, and can effect cures “contrary to the
word and power of God.” He adds, “The magic art has also discovered
ministries contrary to the angels of God, placing the evocation of
souls and the figments of demons in opposition to these.”[1823]
[Sidenote: Deceit in magic.]
But while the marvels of magic are admitted, there is a feeling that
there is something deceitful and unreal about them. The teachings
of the true prophet, we are told, “contain nothing subtle, nothing
composed by magic art to deceive,”[1824] while Simon is “a deceiver and
magician.”[1825] Nor is he deceitful merely in his religious teaching
and his opposition to Peter; even his boasts of magic power are partly
false. Aquila, his former disciple, says, “But when he spoke thus of
the production of sprouts and the perforation of the mountain, I was
confounded on this account, because he wished to deceive even us, in
whom he seemed to place confidence; for we knew that those things had
been from the days of our fathers, which he represented as having been
done by himself lately.”[1826] Moreover, not only does Simon deceive
others; he is himself deceived by demons as Peter twice asserts:[1827]
“He is deluded by demons, yet he thinks that he sees the very substance
of the soul.” “Although in this he is deluded by demons, yet he has
persuaded himself that he has the soul of a murdered boy ministering to
him in whatever he pleases to employ it.”
[Sidenote: Murder of a boy.]
This story of having sacrificed a pure boy for purposes of magic or
divination was a stock charge, which we have previously heard made
against Apollonius of Tyana and which was also told of the early
Christians by their pagan enemies and of the Jews and heretics in the
middle ages. Simon is said to have confessed to Niceta and Aquila,
when they asked how he worked his magic, that he received assistance
from “the soul of a boy, unsullied and violently slain, and invoked
by unutterable adjurations.” He went on to explain that “the soul of
man holds the next place after God, when once it is set free from
the darkness of the body. And immediately it acquires prescience,
wherefore it is invoked in necromancy.” When Aquila asked why the
soul did not take vengeance upon its slayer instead of performing the
behests of magicians, Simon answered that the soul now had the last
judgment too vividly before it to indulge in vengeance, and that the
angels presiding over such souls do not permit them to return to earth
unless “adjured by someone greater than themselves.”[1828] Niceta then
indignantly interposed, “And do you not fear the day of judgment, who
do violence to angels and invoke souls?” As a matter of fact, the
charge that Simon had murdered or violently slain a boy is rather
overdrawn, since the boy in question was the one whom he had made from
air in the first place and whom he simply turned back into air again,
claiming, however, to have thereby produced an unsullied human soul.
According to _The Homilies_, however, he presently confided to Niceta
and Aquila that the human soul did not survive the death of the body
and that a demon really responded to his invocations.[1829]
[Sidenote: Magic is evil.]
Nevertheless, the charge of murder thus made against Simon illustrates
the criminal character here as usually ascribed to magic. Simon is said
to be “wicked above measure,” and to depend upon “magic arts and wicked
devices,” and Peter accuses him of “acting by nefarious arts.”[1830]
Simon in his turn calls Peter “a magician, a godless man, injurious,
cunning, ignorant, and professing impossibilities,” and again “a
magician, a sorcerer, a murderer.”[1831]
[Sidenote: Magic is an art.]
A further characteristic of magic which comes out clearly in _The
Recognitions_ is that it is an art. Demons and souls of the dead
may have a great deal to do with it, but it also requires a human
operator and makes use of materials drawn from the world of nature.
It was by anointing his face with an ointment which the magician had
compounded that the countenance of Faustinianus was transformed into
the likeness of Simon, while Appion and Anubion, who anointed their
faces with the juice of a certain herb, were thereby enabled still to
recognize Faustinianus as himself.[1832] In another passage one of
Simon’s disciples who has deserted him and come to Peter tells how
Simon had made him carry on his back to the seashore a bundle “of his
polluted and accursed secret things.” Simon took the bundle out to sea
in a boat and later returned without it.[1833] Simon not only employed
natural materials in his magic, but was regarded as a learned man,
even by his enemies. He is “by profession a magician, yet exceedingly
well trained in Greek literature.”[1834] He is “a most vehement
orator, trained in the dialectic art, and in the meshes of syllogisms;
and what is most serious of all, he is greatly skilled in the magic
art.”[1835] And he engages with Peter in theological debates. It is
also interesting to note as an illustration of the connection between
magic and experimental science that Simon, in boasting of his feats
of magic, says, “For already I have achieved many things by way of
experiment.”[1836]
[Sidenote: Other accounts of Simon Magus: Justin Martyr to Hippolytus.]
In the Pseudo-Clementines we are told that Simon intended to go to
Rome, but _The Recognitions_ and _The Homilies_ deal only with the
conflicts between Peter and Simon in various Syrian cities and do not
follow them to Rome, where, as other Christian writers tell us, they
had yet other encounters in which Simon finally came to his bitter end.
Justin Martyr, writing about the middle of the second century, states
that Simon, a Samaritan of Gitto, came to Rome in the reign of Claudius
and performed such feats of magic by demon aid that a statue was
erected to him as a god. In this matter of the statue Justin is thought
to have confused Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity, with Simon. Justin adds
that almost all Samaritans and a few persons from other nations still
believe in Simon as the first God, and that a disciple of his, named
Menander, deceived many by magic at Antioch. Justin complains that
the followers of these men are still called Christians and on the
other hand that the emperors do not persecute them as they do other
Christians, although Justin charges them with practicing promiscuous
sexual intercourse as well as magic.[1837] Irenaeus gives a very
similar account.[1838] Origen, as we have seen, denied that there were
more than thirty of Simon’s followers left,[1839] but his contemporary
Tertullian wrote, “At this very time even the heretical dupes of this
same Simon are so much elated by the extravagant pretensions of their
art, that they undertake to bring up from Hades the souls of the
prophets themselves. And I suppose that they can do so under cover
of a lying wonder.”[1840] But Origen and Tertullian add nothing to
the story of Simon Magus himself. Hippolytus, too, implies that Simon
still has followers, since he devotes a number of chapters to stating
and refuting Simon’s doctrines and to “teaching anew the parrots of
Simon that Christ ... was not Simon.”[1841] But Hippolytus also gives
further details concerning Simon’s visit to Rome, stating that he there
encountered the apostles and was repeatedly opposed by Peter, until
finally Simon declared that if he were buried alive he would rise again
upon the third day. His disciples buried him, as they were directed,
but he never reappeared, “for he was not the Christ.”
[Sidenote: Peter’s account in the _Didascalia et Constitutiones
Apostolorum_.]
Peter himself is represented as briefly recounting his struggle at
Rome with Simon Magus in the _Didascalia Apostolorum_, an apocryphal
work of probably the third century, extant in Syriac and Latin, and
more fully in the parallel passage of the Greek _Constitutiones
Apostolorum_, written perhaps about 400 A. D.[1842] Peter found
Simon at Rome drawing many away from the church as well as seducing
the Gentiles by his “magic operation and virtues,” or, in the Greek
version, “magic experiments and the working of demons.”[1843] In the
Syriac and Latin account Peter then states that one day he saw Simon
flying through the air. “And standing beneath I said, ‘In the virtue
of the holy name, Jesus, I cut off your virtues.’ And so falling he
broke the arch (thigh?) of his foot (leg?).”[1844] But he did not die,
since Peter goes on to say that while “many then departed from him,
others who were worthy of him remained with him.” In the longer Greek
version Simon announced his flight in the theater. While all eyes were
turned on Simon, Peter prayed against him. Meanwhile Simon mounted
aloft into mid-air, borne up, Peter says, by demons, and telling
the people that he was ascending to heaven, whence he would return
bringing them good tidings. The people applauded him as a god, but
Peter stretched forth his hands to heaven, supplicating God through
the Lord Jesus to dash down the corrupter and curtail the power of the
demons. He asked further, however, that Simon might not be killed by
his fall but merely bruised. Peter also addressed Simon and the evil
powers who were supporting him, requiring that he might fall and become
a laughing-stock to those who had been deceived by him. Thereupon
Simon fell with a great commotion and bruised his bottom and the
soles of his feet. It will be noted that here, as in the accounts by
some other authors, Peter alone struggles with Simon Magus, lending
color to the Tübingen theory once suggested in connection with the
Pseudo-Clementines, that Simon Magus is meant to represent the apostle
Paul.
[Sidenote: Arnobius, Cyril, and Philastrius.]