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