represents the scoffer, the other represents the philosopher. Not
despising Christianity with scorn like Tacitus, nor jeering at it with
humour like Lucian, Celsus had the wisdom to apprehend danger to
heathenism, measuring Christianity in its mental and not its material
relations; and about the reign of Marcus Aurelius wrote against it a work
entitled Λόγος ἀληθής, which was considered of such importance, that
Origen towards the close of his own life(145) wrote a large and elaborate
reply to it.
We know nothing of Celsus’s life.(146) There is even an uncertainty as to
the school of philosophy to which he belonged. External evidence seems to
testify that he was an Epicurean; but internal would lead us to classify
him with the Platonic. Unscrupulous in argument, confounding canonical
gospels with apocryphal, and Christians with heretical sects, delighting
in searching for contradictions, incapable of understanding the deeper
aspects of Christianity, he has united in his attack all known objections,
making use of minute criticism, philosophical theory, piquant sarcasm, and
eloquent invective, as the vehicle of his passionate assault.
It is impossible to recover a continuous account of the work of Celsus
from the treatise of his respondent; but a careful study of the fragments
embedded in the text of Origen will perhaps restore the framework of the
original sufficiently to enable us to perceive the points of his
opposition to Christianity, and the manner in which his philosophy stood
in the way of the reception of it. (14)
Celsus commences by introducing a Jewish rabbi to attack Christianity from
the monotheistic stand-point of the earlier faith.(147) The Jew is first
made to direct his criticism against the documents of Christianity, and
then the facts narrated.(148) He points out inconsistencies in the gospel
narratives of the genealogy of Christ;(149) utters the most blasphemous
calumnies concerning the incarnation;(150) turns the narrative of the
infancy into ridicule;(151) imputes our Saviour’s miracles to magic;(152)
attacks his divinity;(153) and concentrates the bitterest raillery on the
affecting narrative of our blessed Lord’s most holy passion. Each fact of
deepening sorrow in that divine tragedy, the betrayal,(154) the mental
anguish, the sacred agony,(155) is made the subject of remarks
characterized no less by coarseness of taste and unfairness, than to the
Christian mind by irreverence. Instead of his heart being touched by the
majesty of our Saviour’s sorrow, Celsus only finds an argument against the
divine character of the adorable sufferer.(156) The wonders accompanying
Christ’s death are treated as legends;(157) the resurrection regarded as
an invention or an optical delusion.(158)
After Celsus has thus made the Jew the means of a ruthless attack on
Christianity, he himself directs a similar one against the Jewish religion
itself.(159) He goes to the origin of their history; describes the Jews as
having left Egypt in a sedition;(160) as being true types of the
Christians in their ancient factiousness;(161) considers Moses to be only
on a level with the early Greek legislators;(162) regards Jewish rites
like circumcision to be borrowed from Egypt; charges anthropomorphism on
Jewish theology,(163) and declines allowing the allegorical interpretation
in explanation of it;(164) examines Jewish prophecy, parallels it with
heathen oracles,(165) and claims that the goodness not the truth of a
prophecy ought to be considered;(166) points to the ancient idolatry of
the Jews as proof that they were not better than other nations;(167) and
to the destruction of Jerusalem as proof that they were not special
favourites of heaven. At last he arrives at their idea of creation,(168)
and here reveals the real ground of his antipathy. While he objects to
details in the narrative, such as the mention of days before the existence
of the sun,(169) his real hatred is against the idea of the unity of God,
and the freedom of Deity in the act of creation. It is the struggle of
pantheism against theism.
When Celsus has thus made use of the Jew to refute Christianity from the
Jewish stand-point, and afterwards refuted the Jew from his own, he
proceeds to make his own attack on Christianity; in doing which, he first
examines the lives of Christians,(170) and afterwards the Christian
doctrine;(171) thus skilfully prejudicing the mind of his readers against
the persons before attacking the doctrines. He alludes to the
quarrelsomeness shown in the various sects of Christians,(172) and repeats
the calumnious suspicion of disloyalty,(173) want of patriotism,(174) and
political uselessness;(175) and hence defends the public persecution of
them.(176) Filled with the esoteric pride of ancient philosophy, he
reproaches the Christians with their carefulness to proselytize the
poor,(177) and to convert the vicious;(178) thus unconsciously giving a
noble testimony to one of the most divine features in our religion, and
testifying to the preaching of the doctrine of a Saviour for sinners.
Having thus defamed the Christians, he passes to the examination of the
Christian doctrine, in its form, its method, and its substance. His
æsthetic sense, ruined with the idolatry of form, and unable to appreciate
the thought, regards the Gospels as defective and rude through
simplicity.(179) The method of Christian teaching also seems to him to be
defective, as lacking philosophy and dialectic, and as denouncing the use
of reason.(180) Lastly, he turns to the substance of the dogmas
themselves. He distinguishes two elements in them, the one of which, as
bearing resemblance to philosophy or to heathen religion, he regards as
incontestably true, but denies its originality, and endeavours to derive
it from Persia or from Platonism;(181) resolving, for example, the worship
of a human being into the ordinary phenomenon of apotheosis.(182) The
other class of doctrines which he attacks as false, consists of those
which relate to creation,(183) the incarnation,(184) the fall,(185)
redemption,(186) man’s place in creation,(187) moral conversions,(188) and
the resurrection of the dead.(189) His point of view for criticising them
is derived from the fundamental dualism of the Platonic system; the
eternal severance of matter and mind, of God and the world; and the
reference of good to the region of mind, evil to that of matter. Thus, not
content with his former attack on the idea of creation in discussion with
the Jew, he returns to the discussion from the philosophical side. His
Platonism will not allow him to admit that the absolute God, the first
Cause, can have any contact with matter. It leads him also to give
importance to the idea of δαίμονες, or divine mediators, by which the
chasm is filled between the ideal god and the world;(190) not being able
otherwise to imagine the action of the pure ἰδέα of God on a world of
matter. Hence he blames Christians for attributing an evil nature to
demons, and finds a reasonable interpretation of the heathen worship.(191)
The same dualist theory extinguishes the idea of the incarnation, as a
degradation of God; and also the doctrine of the fall, inasmuch as
psychological deterioration is impossible if the soul be pure, and if evil
be a necessary attribute of matter.(192) With the fall, redemption also
disappears, because the perfect cannot admit of change; Christ’s coming
could only be to correct what God already knew, or rectify what ought to
have been corrected before.(193) Further, Celsus argues, if Divinity did
descend, that it would not assume so lowly a form as Jesus. The same
rigorous logic charges on Christianity the undue elevation of man, as well
as the abasement of God. Celsus can neither admit man more than the brutes
to be the final cause of the universe; nor allow the possibility of man’s
nearness to God.(194) His pantheism, destroying the barrier which
separates the material from the moral, obliterates the perception of the
fact that a single free responsible being may be of more dignity than the
universe.
Such is the type of a philosophical objector against Christianity, a
little later than the middle of the second century. We meet here for the
first time a remarkable effort of pagan thought, endeavouring to
extinguish the new religion; the definite statements of a mind that
investigated its claims and rejected it. Most of the objections of Celsus
are sophistical; a few are admitted difficulties; but the philosophical
class of them will be seen to be the corollary from his general principle
before explained.
A century intervenes before we meet with the next literary assailant,
Porphyry. In the interval the new reactionary philosophy has fully taken
root, and the fresh attack accordingly bears the impress of the new
system.
The chief objections made in the intervening period, as we collect them
from the apologies, were such as belongs fitly to a transitional time,
when Christianity was exciting attention but was not understood;(195) and
are chiefly the result of the second of the tendencies before named, viz.,
either of popular prejudice, or of the political alarm in reference to the
social disorganization likely to arise out of a large defection from the
religion of the empire, which expressed itself in overt acts of
persecution on the part of the state. (15) Both equally lie beyond our
field of investigation; the one because it does not belong to the
examination of Christianity made by intelligent thought; the other because
it is the struggle of deeds, not of ideas, which only have an interest for
us, if, as in Julian’s case hereafter, the acts were dictated by the
deliberate advice of persons who had attentively examined Christianity.
The apprehensions of prejudice gradually subsided, and objections began to
be based on grounds less absurd in character. The political opposition
also was henceforth founded on a more subtle policy, and on an
appreciation of the nature of Christianity. Soon after the middle of the
third century we meet with the next attack of a purely literary kind,
viz., by Porphyry, the most distinguished opponent that Christianity has
yet encountered.(196) The pupil of Longinus, perhaps of Origen,(197) and
the biographer and interpreter of Plotinus, he is best known for his
logical writings, and for the development of the theory of predication in
his introduction to the Categories, which formed the text on which hung
the mediæval speculations of scholasticism.(198) His Syrian origin and
oriental culture perhaps prepared him for a fusion of East and West, and
for admitting a deeper admixture of mysticism into the Neo-Platonic
philosophy, of which he was a disciple. The points of his approximation to
Christianity are the result of those elements in which heathen philosophy
most nearly approached to Christian truth, the development of which was
stimulated in minds essentially anti-christian by the effort to find a
rival to it. Admirably prepared by his serious and spiritual tone to
embrace Christianity, he nevertheless lived a disciple of paganism. His
feelings rather than his reason led him to defend national creeds. His
philosophy and the Christian, which seemed to be aspirations after the
same end, being designed to elevate the spirit above the world of sense,
were really radically opposed. Understanding therefore the power of the
Christian religion, he felt the necessity for supplanting it; and hoped to
do so by spiritualizing the old creeds, which he harmonized with
philosophy by means of regarding them as symbolic.(199)
His opposition to Christianity was not however based wholly on a prejudice
of feeling. He was a man cultivated in all the learning of his age, and of
a more generous temper than Celsus, and seems to have exercised much
critical sagacity in the investigation of the claims of Christianity.
About the year 270, while in retirement in Sicily, he wrote a book against
the Christians.(200) This work having been destroyed, we are left to
gather its contents and the opinions of its authors from a few criticisms
in Eusebius and Jerome. The entire work consisted of fifteen books; and
concerning only five of these is information afforded by them. Their
remarks lead us to conjecture that it was an assault on Christianity in
many relations. The books however of which we know the purpose, seem to
have been critical rather than philosophical, directed against the grounds
of the religion rather than its character; being in fact an assault on the
Bible. The existence of such a line of argument, of which a trace was
already observable in Celsus, is explained by the circumstance that the
faith of Christendom was already fixed on the authority of the sacred
books. The church had always acknowledged the authority of the Jewish
scriptures; and by the middle or close of the second century at the
latest, it had come to acknowledge explicitly the co-ordinate authority of
a body of Christian literature, historic, and epistolary.(201) Hence, when
once the idea of a rule of faith had grown common, the investigation of
the contents of the scriptures became necessary on the part of heathen
opponents. The growingly critical character of Porphyry’s statements,
though partly attributable to the literary culture of his mind, is a
slight undesigned evidence corroborative of the authoritative nature
already attributed to the scriptures in doctrine and truthfulness.
Porphyry seems accordingly to have directed his critical powers to show
such traces of mistakes and incorrectness as might invalidate the idea of
a supernatural origin for the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and shake
confidence in their truth as an authority.
The first book of his work(202) dragged to light some of the
discrepancies, real or supposed, in scripture; and the examination of the
dispute between St. Peter and St. Paul was quoted as an instance of the
admixture of human ingredients in the body of apostolic teaching. His
third book(203) was directed to the subject of scripture interpretation,
especially, with some inconsistency, against the allegorical or mystical
tendency which at that time marked the whole church, and especially the
Alexandrian fathers. The allegorical method coincided with, if it did not
arise from, the oriental instinct of symbolism, the natural poetry of the
human mind. But in the minds of Jews and Christians it had been sanctified
by its use in the Hebrew religion, and had become associated with the
apocryphal literature of the Jewish church. It is traceable to a more
limited extent in the inspired writers of the New Testament, and in most
of the fathers; but in the school of Alexandria(204) it was adopted as a
formal system of interpretation. It is this allegorical system which
Porphyry attacked. He assaulted the writings of those who had fancifully
allegorised the Old Testament in the pious desire of finding Christianity
in every part of it, in spite of historic conditions; and he hastily drew
the inference, with something like the feeling of doubt which rash
interpretations of prophecy are in danger of producing at this day, that
no consistent sense can be put upon the Old Testament. His fourth
book(205) was a criticism on the Mosaic history, and on Jewish
antiquities. But the most important books in his work were the
twelfth(206) and thirteenth,(207) which were devoted to an examination of
the prophecies of Daniel, in which he detected some of those peculiarities
on which modern criticism has employed itself, and arrived at the
conclusions in reference to its date, revived by the English deist Collins
in the last century, and by many German critics in the present.
It is well known that half of the book of Daniel(208) is historic, half
prophetic. Each of these parts is distinguished from similar portions of
the Old Testament by some peculiarities. Porphyry is not recorded as
noticing any of those which belong to the historic part, unless we may
conjecture, from his theory of the book being originally written in Greek,
that he detected the presence of those Greek words in Nebuchadnezzar’s
edicts, which many modern critics have contended could not be introduced
into Chaldæa antecedently to the Macedonian conquest.(209) The peculiarity
alleged to belong to the prophetical part is its apocalyptic tone. It
looks, it has been said, historical rather than prophetical. Definite
events, and a chain of definite events, are predicted with the precision
of historical narrative;(210) whereas most prophecy is a moral sermon, in
which general moral predictions are given, with specific historic ones
interspersed. Nor is this, which is shared in a less degree by occasional
prophecies elsewhere, the only peculiarity alleged, but it is affirmed
also that the definite character ceases at a particular period of the
reign of Antiochus Epiphanes,(211) down to which the very campaigns of the
Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties are noted, but subsequently to which the
prophetic tone becomes more vague and indefinite. Hence the conjecture has
been hazarded that it was written in the reign of Antiochus by a
Palestinian Jew, who gathered up the traditions of Daniel’s life, and
wrote the recent history of his country in eloquent language, in an
apocalyptic form; which, after the literary fashion of his age, he imputed
to an ancient seer, Daniel; definite up to the period at which he composed
it, indefinite as he gazed on the future. (16) It was this peculiarity,
the supposed ceasing of the prophecies in the book of Daniel at a definite
date, which was noticed by Porphyry, and led him to suggest the theory of
its authorship just named.(212) These remarks will give an idea of the
critical acuteness of Porphyry. His objections are not, it will be
observed, founded on quibbles like those of Celsus, but on instructive
literary characteristics, many of which are greatly exaggerated or grossly
misinterpreted, but still are real, and suggest difficulties or inquiries
which the best modern theological critics have honourably felt to demand
candid examination and explanation.(213)
A period of about thirty years brings us to the date of the Diocletian
persecution, A.D. 303; during the progress of which another noted attack
was made. It was by Hierocles, then president of Bithynia, and afterwards
præfect of Alexandria, himself one of the instigators of the persecution
and an agent in effecting it.(214) His line of argument was more specific
than those previously named, being directed against the evidence which was
derived by Christians for the truth of their religion from the character
and miraculous works of Christ; and his aim accordingly was to develope
the character of Apollonius of Tyana,(215) as a rival to our Saviour in
piety and miraculous power.
Apollonius was a Pythagorean philosopher, born in Cappadocia about four
years before the Christian era. After being early educated in the circle
of philosophy, and in the practice of the ascetic discipline of his
predecessor Pythagoras, he imitated that philosopher in spending the next
portion of his life in travel. Attracted by his mysticism to the farthest
East as the source of knowledge, he set out for Persia and India; and in
Nineveh on his route met Damis, the future chronicler of his actions.
Returning from the East instructed in Brahminic lore, he travelled over
the Roman world. The remainder of his days was spent in Asia Minor.
Statues and temples were erected to his honour. He obtained vast
influence, and died with the reputation of sanctity late in the century.
Such is the outline of his life, if we omit the numerous legends and
prodigies which attach themselves to his name. He was partly a
philosopher, partly a magician; half mystic, half impostor.(216) At the
distance of a century and a quarter from his death, in the reign of
Septimius Severus, at the request of the wife of that emperor, the second
of the three Philostrati dressed up Damis’s narrative of his life, in a
work still remaining, and paved a way for the general reception of the
story among the cultivated classes of Rome and Greece.(217) It has been
thought that Philostratus had a polemical aim against the Christian
faith,(218) as the memoir of Apollonius is in so many points a parody on
the life of Christ. The annunciation of his birth to his mother, the
chorus of swans which sang for joy on occasion of it, the casting out
devils, the raising the dead, the healing the sick, the sudden
disappearance and reappearance of Apollonius, the sacred voice which
called him at his death, and his claim to be a teacher with authority to
reform the world, form some of the points of similarity.
If such was the intention of Philostratus, he was really a
controversialist under the form of a writer of romance; employed by those
who at that time were labouring (as already named) to introduce an
eclecticism largely borrowed from the East into the region both of
philosophy and religion. Without settling this question, it is at least
certain that about the beginning of the next century the heathen writers
adopted this line of argument, and sought to exhibit a rival ideal.(219)
One instance is the life of Pythagoras by Iamblichus; another that which
Hierocles wrote, in part of which he used Philostratus’s untrustworthy
memoir for the purpose of instituting a comparison between Apollonius and
Christ. The sceptic who referred religious phenomena to fanaticism would
hence avail himself of the comparison as a satisfactory account of the
origin of Christianity; while others would adopt the same view as
Hierocles, and deprive the Christian miracles of the force of evidence,—a
line of argument which was reproduced by an English deist(220) who
translated the work of Philostratus at the end of the seventeenth century.
The work of Hierocles is lost, but an outline of its argument, with
extracts, remains in a reply which Eusebius wrote to a portion of it (17).
Though couched in a seeming spirit of fairness, the tone was such as would
be expected from one who ungenerously availed himself of the very moment
of a cruel persecution as the occasion of this literary attack.
But the time of the church’s sorrow was nearly past. The hour of
deliverance was at hand. The emperor Constantine proclaimed
toleration,(221) and subsequently established Christianity as the
state-religion. Only one moment more of peril was permitted to befall it.
After an interval in which Christian emperors reigned, Julian ascended the
throne, and employed his short reign of two years(222) in trying to
restore heathenism; and during the last winter of his life, while halting
at Antioch in the course of his Eastern war, wrote an elaborate work
against Christianity.(223) The book itself has been destroyed, but the
reply remains which Cyril of Alexandria thought it necessary to write more
than half a century afterwards; and by this means we can gather Julian’s
opinions, just as from his own letters and the contemporary history we can
gather his plans. The material struggle of deeds belongs in this instance
to our subject, inasmuch as it is the overt expression of the struggle of
ideas.