The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

Barnabas discovers another prophecy of Jesus in an unlikely place. "Learn, children of love," he says," that Abraham, who first gave circumcision, looked forward in spirit unto Jesus, when he circumcised, for he received dogmata in three letters. For it saith: And Abraham circumcised of his house men 18 and 300. What then was the knowledge given unto him? Mark that it says 18 first, and then after a pause 300. 18 [IH in Greek notation] there thou hast Jesus. And because the cross in T [= 300 in Greek notation] was to have grace, it saith 300 as well. It shows Jesus in the two letters, and in the one the cross."[577]

We now reach the prophecies of the cross, and, as the method is plain, a few references may suffice, taken this time from Tertullian (c. 10): —

Genesis 22, 6: Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice of himself.

Genesis 37, 28: Joseph sold by his brethren.

Deuteronomy 33,17: Moses' blessing of Joseph. (The unicorn's horns, with some arrangement, form a cross: cf. Psalm 22).

Exodus 17, 11: Moses with his arms spread wide.

Numbers 21, 9: The brazen serpent.

Psalm 96, 10: The Lord hath reigned from the tree, e ligno (though the Jews have cut out the last words).

Isaiah 9, 6: The government upon his shoulder.

Jeremiah 11, 19: Let us cast wood (lignum) into his bread.

Isaiah 53, 8, 9: For the transgression of my people is he stricken … and his sepulture is taken from the midst (i. e. the resurrection).

Amos 8, 9: I will cause the sun to go down at noon.

For a long time before Justin was done with his exposition, Trypho was silent – the better part, perhaps, in all controversy. At last, writes Justin, "I finished. Trypho said nothing for a while, and then he said, 'You see, we came to the controversy unprepared. Still, I own, I am greatly pleased to have met you, and I think my friends have the same feeling. For we have found more than we expected, – or anyone could have expected. If we could do it at more length, we might be better profited by looking into the passages themselves. But, since you are on the point of sailing and expect to embark every day now, – be sure you think of us as friends, if you go.'"[578] So, with kindly feelings, Trypho went away unconvinced. And there were others, as clear of mind, who were as little convinced, – Marcion, for instance, and Celsus. "The more reasonable among Jews and Christians," says Celsus, "try to allegorize them [the Scriptures], but they are beyond being allegorized and are nothing but sheer mythology of the silliest type. The supposed allegories that have been made are more disgraceful than the myths and more absurd, in their endeavour to string together what never can in any way be harmonized – it is folly positively wonderful for its utter want of perception."[579] The modern reader may not be so ready as Origen was to suggest that Celsus probably had Philo in mind.[580]

Results

It is clear that, in the endeavour to give Christianity a historical background and a prophetic warrant, the Apologists lost all perspective.[581] The compelling personality of Jesus receded behind the vague figure of the Christ of prophecy; and, in their pre-occupation with what they themselves called "types and shadows," men stepped out of the sunlight into the shade and hardly noticed the change. Yet there is still among the best of them the note of love of Jesus – "do not speak evil of the crucified," pleads Justin, "nor mock at his stripes, whereby all may be healed, as we have been healed."[582] And after all it was an instinct for the truth and universal significance of Jesus that carried them away. He must be eternal; and they, like the men of their day, thought much of the beginning and the end of creation, and perhaps found it easier than we do, – certainly more natural, – to frame schemes under which the Eternal Mind might manifest itself. Eschatology, purpose, foreknowledge, pervade their religious thought, and they speak with a confidence which the centuries since the Renaissance have made more and more impossible for us, who find it hard enough to be sure of the fact without adventuring ourselves in the possibilities that lie around it. None the less the centre of interest was the same for them as for us – what is the significance of Jesus of Nazareth? For them the facts of his life and of his mind had often less value than the fancy that they fulfilled prophecy; Celsus said outright that the Christians altered them, and there is some evidence that, in the accommodation of prophecy and history, the latter was sometimes over-developed. For us, the danger is the opposite; we risk losing sight of the eternal significance in our need of seeing clearly the historic lineaments.

In the conflict of religions, Christianity had first to face Judaism, and, though the encounter left its record upon the conquering faith, it secured its freedom from the yoke of the past. It gained background and the broadening of the historic imagination. It made the prophets and psalmists of Israel a permanent and integral part of Christian literature – and in all these ways it became more fit to be the faith of mankind, as it deepened its hold upon the universal religious experience. Yet it did so at the cost of a false method which has hampered it for centuries, and of a departure (for too long a time) from the simplicity and candour of the mind of Jesus. In seeking to recover that mind to-day we commit ourselves to the belief that it is sufficient, and that, when we have rid ourselves of all that in the course of ages has obscured the great personality, in proportion as we regain his point of view, we shall find once more (in the words of a far distant age) that his spirit will guide us into all truth.

CHAPTER VII

"GODS OR ATOMS?"

In the first two centuries of our era a great change came over the ancient world. A despised and traditional religion, under the stimulus of new cults coming from the East, revived and re-asserted its power over the minds of men. Philosophy, grown practical in its old age, forsook its youthful enthusiasm for the quest of truth, and turned aside to the regulation of conduct, by means of maxims now instead of inspiration, and finally, as we have seen, to apology for the ancient faith of the fathers. Its business now was to reconcile its own monotheistic dogma with popular polytheistic practice. It was perhaps this very reconciliation that threw open the door for the glowing monotheism of the disciples of Jesus; but, whatever the cause, Christianity quickly spread over the whole Roman Empire. We are apt to wonder to-day at the great political and national developments that have altered the whole aspect of Europe since the French Revolution, and to reflect rather idly on their rapidity. Yet the past has its own stories of rapid change, and not the least striking of them is the disappearance of that world of thought which we call Classical. By 180 A.D. nearly every distinctive mark of classical antiquity is gone – the old political ideas, the old philosophies, the old literatures, and much else with them. Old forms and names remain – there are still consuls and archons, poets and philosophers, but the atmosphere is another, and the names have a new meaning, if they have any at all. But the mere survival of the names hid for many the fact that they were living in a new era.

Marcus Aurelius

In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, however, the signs of change became more evident, and men grew conscious that some transformation of the world was in progress. A great plague, the scanty records of which only allow us to speak in vague terms of an immense reduction in population[583] – barbarism active upon the frontier of an Empire not so well able as it had fancied to defend itself – superstitions, Egyptian and Jewish, diverting men from the ordinary ways of civic duty – such were some of the symptoms that men marked. Under the weight of absurdity, quietism and individualism, the state seemed to be sinking, and all that freedom of mind which was the distinctive boast of Hellenism was rapidly being lost.

It happens that, while the historical literature of the period has largely perished, a number of authors survive, who from their various points of view deal with what is our most immediate subject – the conflict of religions. Faith, doubt, irritation and fatalism are all represented. The most conspicuous men of letters of the age are undoubtedly the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself and his two brilliant contemporaries, Lucian of Samosata, and Apuleius of Madaura.[584] Celsus, a man of mind as powerful as any of the three, survives in fragments, but fragments ample enough to permit of re-construction. Among the Christians too there was increased literary activity, but Tertullian and Clement will suffice for our purpose.

Though not in his day regarded as a man of letters, it is yet in virtue of his writing that Marcus Aurelius survives. His journal, with the title that tells its nature – "To Himself," is to-day perhaps the most popular book of antiquity with those whose first concern is not literature. It is translated again and again, and it is studied. The peculiar mind of the solitary Emperor has made him, as Mr F. W. H. Myers put it, "the saint and exemplar of Agnosticism." Meditative, tender and candid, yet hesitant and so far ineffectual, he is sensitive to so much that is positive and to so much that is negative, that the diary, in which his character is most intimately revealed, gives him a place of his own in the hearts of men perplext in the extreme. He is a man who neither believes, nor disbelieves, – "either gods or atoms"[585] seems to be the necessary antithesis, and there is so much to be said both for and against each of the alternatives that decision is impossible. He is attracted by the conception of Providence, but he hesitates to commit himself. There are arguments – at least of the kind that rest on probability – in favour of immortality, but they are insufficient to determine the matter. In his public capacity he became famous for the number and magnificence of his sacrifices to the gods of the state; he owns in his journal his debt to the gods for warnings given in dreams, but he suspects at times that they may not exist. Meanwhile he persecutes the Christians for their disloyalty to the state. Their stubborn convictions were so markedly in contrast with his own wavering mind that he could not understand them – perhaps their motive was bravado, he thought; they were too theatrical altogether; their pose recalled the tragedies composed by the pupils of the rhetoricians – large language with nothing behind it.[586]

In the absence of any possibility of intellectual certainty, Marcus fell back upon conduct. Here his want of originality and of spiritual force was less felt, for conduct has tolerably well-established rules of neighbourliness, purity, good temper, public duty and the like. His Stoic guides, too, might in this region help him to follow with more confidence the voice of his own pure and delicate conscience – the conscience of a saint and a quietist rather than that of a man of action. Yet even in the realm of conduct he is on the whole ineffectual. Pure, truthful, kind, and brave he is, but he does not believe enough to be great. He is called to be a statesman and an administrator; he does not expect much outcome from all his energies, and he preaches to himself the necessity of patience with his prospective failure to achieve anything beyond the infinitesimal. "Ever the same are the cycles of the universe, up and down, for ever and for ever. Either the intelligence of the Whole puts itself in motion for each separate effect – in which case accept the result it gives; or else it did so once for all, and everything is sequence, one thing in another … [The text is doubtful for a line] … In a word, either God, and all goes well; or all at random – live not thou at random.

"A moment, and earth will cover us all; then it too in its turn will change; and what it changes to, will change again and again for ever; and again change after change to infinity. The waves of change and transformation – if a man think of them and of their speed, he will despise everything mortal.

"The universal cause is like a winter torrent; it carries all before it. How cheap then these poor statesmen, these who carry philosophy into practical affairs, as they fancy – poor diminutive creatures. Drivellers. Man, what then? Do what now Nature demands. Start, if it be given thee, and look not round to see if any will know. Hope not for Plato's Republic;[587] but be content if the smallest thing advance; to compass that one issue count no little feat.

"Who shall change one of their dogmata [the regular word of Epictetus]? And without a change of dogmata, what is there but the slavery of men groaning and pretending to obey? Go now, and talk of Alexander, and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum; whether they saw the will of Nature and schooled themselves, is their affair; if they played the tragic actor, no one has condemned me to copy them. Simplicity and modesty are the work of philosophy; do not lead me astray into vanity.

"Look down from above on the countless swarms of men, their countless initiations, and their varied voyage in storm and calm, their changing combinations, as they come into being, meet, and pass out of being. Think too of the life lived by others of old, of the life that shall be lived by others after thee, of the life now lived among the barbarian nations; and, of how many have never heard thy name, and how many will at once forget it, and how many may praise thee now perhaps but will very soon blame thee; and how neither memory is of any account, nor glory, nor anything else at all…

"The rottenness of the material substance of every individual thing – water, dust, bones, stench… And this breathing element is another of the same, changing from this to that…

"Either the gods have no power, or they have power. If they have not, why pray? If they have, why not pray for deliverance from the fear, or the desire, or the pain, which the thing causes, rather than for the withholding or the giving of the particular thing? For certainly, if they can co-operate with men, it is for these purposes they can co-operate. But perhaps thou wilt say, The gods have put all these in my own power. Then is it not better to use what is in thine own power and be free, than to be set on what is not in thy power – a slave and contemptible? And who told thee that the gods do not help us even to what is in our own power?"[588]

This handful of short passages all from the same place, with a few omitted, may be taken as representing very fairly the mind of Marcus Aurelius. The world was his to rule, and he felt it a duty to remember how slight a thing it was. This was not the temper of Alexander or of Cæsar, – of men who make mankind, and who, by their belief in men and in the power of their own ideas to lift men to higher planes of life, actually do secure that advance is made, – and that advance not the smallest. Yet he speaks of Alexander as a "tragic actor."[589] For a statesman, the attitude of Marcus is little short of betrayal. He worked, he ruled, he endowed, he fought – he was pure, he was conscientious, he was unselfish – but he did not believe, and he was ineffectual. The Germans it might have been beyond any man's power to repel at that day, but even at home Marcus was ineffectual. His wife and his son were by-words. He had almost a morbid horror of defilement from men and women of coarse minds, – a craving too for peace and sympathy; he shrank into himself, condoned, ignored. Among his benefactors he does not mention Hadrian, who really gave him the Empire – and it is easy to see why. In everything the two are a contrast. Hadrian's personal vices and his greatness as a ruler, as a man handling men and moving among ideas[590] – these were impossible for Marcus.

Nor was the personal religion of this pure and candid spirit a possible one for mankind. "A genuine eternal Gospel," wrote Renan of this diary of Marcus, "the book of the Thoughts will never grow old, for it affirms no dogma. The Gospel has grown old in certain parts; Science no longer allows us to admit the naïve conception of the supernatural which is its base… Yet Science might destroy God and the soul, and the book of the Thoughts would remain young in its life and truth." Renan is right; when Science, or anything else, "destroys God and the soul," there is no Gospel but that of Marcus; and yet for men it is impossible; and it is not young – it is senile. Duty without enthusiasm, hope or belief – belief in man, of course, for "God and the soul" are by hypothesis "destroyed" – duty, that is, without object, reason or result, it is a magnificent fancy, and yet one recurs to the criticism that Marcus passed upon the Christians. Is there not a hint of the school about this? Is it not possible that the simpler instincts of men, – instincts with a history as ludicrous as Anthropologists sometimes sketch for us, – may after all come nearer the truth of things than semi-Stoic reflexion? At all events the instincts have ruled the world so far with the co-operation of Reason, and are as yet little inclined to yield their rights to their colleague. They have never done so without disaster.

The world did not accept Marcus as a teacher. Men readily recognized his high character, but for a thousand years and more nobody dreamed of taking him as a guide – nobody, that is, outside the schools. For the world it was faith or unbelief, and the two contemporaries already mentioned represent the two poles to which the thoughts of men gravitated, who were not yet ready for a cleavage with the past.

Lucian

"I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,"[591] wrote Lucian of himself; and elsewhere he has a playful protest against a historian of his day, magnificently ignorant of Eastern geography, who "has taken up my native Samosata, and shifted it, citadel, walls and all, into Mesopotamia," and by this new feat of colonization has apparently turned him into a Parthian or Mesopotamian.[592] Samosata lay actually in Commagene, and there Lucian spent his boyhood talking Syriac, his native language.[593] He was born about 125 A.D. His family were poor, and as soon as he left school, the question of a trade was at once raised, for even a boy's earnings would be welcome. At school he had had a trick of scraping the wax from his tablets and making little figures of animals and men, so his father handed him over to his mother's brother, who was one of a family of statuaries. But a blunder and a breakage resulted in his uncle thrashing him, and he ran home to his mother. It was his first and last day in the sculptor's shop, and he went to bed with tears upon his face. In later life he told the story of a dream which he had that night – a long and somewhat literary dream modelled on Prodicus' fable of the Choice of Herakles. He dreamed that two women appeared to him, one dusty and workmanlike, the other neat, charming and noble. They were Sculpture and Culture, and he chose the latter. He tells the dream, he says, that the young may be helped by his example to pursue the best and devote themselves to Culture, regardless of immediate poverty.[594] He was launched somehow on the career of his choice and became a rhetorician. It may be noted however that an instinctive interest in art remained with him, and he is reckoned one of the best art-critics of antiquity.

Rhetoric, he says, "made a Greek of him," went with him from city to city in Greece and Ionia, "sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path."[595] For, as he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[596] But, about the age of forty, he resolved "to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in peace – tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough eulogized."[597] From now onward he wrote dialogues – he had at last found his proper work.

Lucian's Dialogues

Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation – "had trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car." But it was to do so no more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue, by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him associate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling dog of a Cynic, – thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty, superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy? Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[598] Lucian created a new mode in writing – or perhaps he revived it, for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus, the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.

Menippus however has perished and Lucian remains and is read; for, whatever else is to be said of him, he is readable. He has not lost all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple, despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk, – as men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being overheard, – with a naïve frankness not always very wise, with a freedom and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the speaker. They rarely declaim, and they certainly never reach any high level of thought or feeling. The talk is slight and easy – it flickers about from one idea to another, and gives a strong impression of being real. If it is gods who are talking, they become surprisingly human – and even bourgeois, they are so very much at home among themselves. Lucian's skill is amazing. He will take some episode from Homer and change no single detail, and yet, as we listen to the off-hand talk of the gods as they recount the occurrence, we are startled at the effect – the irony is everywhere and nowhere; the surprises are irresistible. Zeus, for instance, turns out to have more literary interests than we suppose; he will quote Homer and make a Demosthenic oration to the gods, though alas! his memory fails him in the middle of a sentence;[599] he laments that his altars are as cold as Plato's Laws or the syllogisms of Chrysippus. He is the frankest gentleman of heaven, and so infinitely obliging!

In short, for sheer cleverness Lucian has no rival but Aristophanes in extant Greek literature. His originality, his wit, his humour (not at all equal, it may be said, to his wit), his gifts of invention and fancy, his light touch, and his genius for lively narrative, mark him out distinctively in an age when literature was all rhetoric, length and reminiscence. But as we read him, we become sensible of defects as extraordinary as his gifts. For all his Attic style, he belongs to his age. He may renounce Rhetoric, but no man can easily escape from his past. The education had intensified the cardinal faults of his character, impatience, superficiality, a great lack of sympathy for the more tender attachments and the more profound interests of men – essential unbelief in human grandeur. An expatriated adventurer, living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry, – it was hardly to be expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul, lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise at all. "Free-Speech, son of True-man, son of Examiner," he calls himself in one of his mock trials, "hater of shams, hater of impostors, hater of liars, hater of the pompous, hater of every such variety of hateful men – and there are plenty of them"; conversely, he loves the opposites, when he meets them, which, he owns, is not very often.[600]