CHAPTER XIII.

PAGAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

I

THE FORMATION OF THE CANON

 

AFTER the execution of Ignatius of Antioch, in the days of  Trajan, the Christian Church enjoyed a long period of peace from persecution by the State. But the ‘struggle for existence’ never ends, and the period from about 120 to 190 shows us the new Society adapting itself to its environment in the Roman Empire. In the great work of Irenaeus Against Heresies (a.d. 186) we find a literary expression of the Catholic system, so complete and successful that the whole history of the Church from Irenaeus to the Reformation, and even later, may be viewed as a natural development of it. Before Irenaeus, on the other hand, new factors were continually presenting themselves. Some of these the Church accepted; others it rejected, but in rejecting them the opinion of the dominant party was profoundly modified. At the end of the period the Church’s face is definitely turned back to the infallible Past, to the tradition and memory of the days of the first apostles.

The Christian Church, at the beginning of the period considered in this chapter, was a somewhat loosely organized collection of local societies. They were held together mainly by a common Hope and a Holy Book. The Hope was that their Lord Jesus, who had been crucified in Judaea and yet had risen again, was coming very soon from heaven to judge the living and the dead and to renew the earth, and they believed that their Holy Book (which was also the Holy Book of the Jews) had foretold this of their Lord, as well as many details of His career when He lived on earth. Both these main Articles of Faith were encompassed with difficulties, both in themselves and as credenda for new converts.

The consideration of the Bible and its place in the Christian scheme is mainly an affair of ecclesiastical history and development, leading to the formation of the Christian Canon of the Old and the New Testaments, but it is necessary to have some idea of the trains of thought which led up to this conclusion and to consider briefly some of the main personalities connected with it. We must, in the first place, dismiss altogether from our minds the modern evolutionary view which believes that truth and excellence of every kind have developed by a sort of organic process from small and perhaps unlovely beginnings, with fresh elements of real value coming in from time to time by what is not so much evolution as 'epigenesis.' Neither the Christians nor the pagans so regarded the Old Testament. It was true or false, enlightening or the reverse. There was, it is true, much in the Bible which was shocking to the would-be convert. It was not so much the miraculous element and the geocentric outlook that were a difficulty to the heathen, for these things they shared with the Christian, but they were deterred by the barbarous style of the Greek and by the presence of trifling regulations and taboos which seemed to be beneath the dignity of the Highest God. On the other hand, the Christians were able to argue that the whole Bible, i.e. the ‘Old Testament,’ was written long before Plato; and the ‘argument from prophecy,’ the assertion that this or that event in the career of Jesus Christ had been indicated by Hebrew Prophets long ago, seems to have had real weight.

The difficulty felt by the Christians was rather this: if the Bible was the very word of God, by what right did Christians disobey so many of the plain commands found in it? Christians ate pork and hare, and disregarded all the ritual laws of the Pentateuch: was the Pentateuch after all God’s book? One answer to this question was given in the Epistle of Barnabas, a very early document, perhaps Alexandrian, which maintained that all the so-called food­laws were misinterpreted by the Jews and that they were really moral commands to avoid the society of various types of sinners. The Bible, on this view, was wholly moral, but obscurely expressed. Another view, given by one Ptolemaeus, a disciple of Valentinus the gnostic, was that we have to distinguish different elements in the Jewish code. There are elements which come merely from the ‘tradition of the elders,’ others that were added by Moses because of the hardness of the Israelites’ hearts, others that are really divine. Of this last class, some were figurative, like the command to eat unleavened bread at Passover, now fulfilled in Christ; other things are permanent, like the Decalogue. A very similar theory to this is to be found in the Didascalia, a manual for Christians written somewhere in the East during the first half of the third century. In this work we are taught that the good Law is the Ten Words and the Judgments, given before the Israelites made the golden calf and served idols. But the rest was given because the Lord was angry with them, and so He laid on the Israelites new and burdensome laws, from which Jesus has delivered Christians.

A more radical solution was championed by Marcion of Pontus. According to the Chronicle of Edessa he left the Catholic Church in a.d. 138, so that we may place his career between 100 and 170, during the first half of which he was not a declared heretic. He started from the kindness of the Father whom Jesus had announced, and whose gracious willingness to forgive freely was different in character from the severe justice of the God of the Bible. Marcion concluded that they could not be the same, and that the Gospel of Jesus was something wholly new. According to Marcion, the world set forth in the Bible, i.e. the Old Testament, is the product of Law acting upon Matter. Law cannot and will not forgive: the God of Law and Justice exacts ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ in other words ‘action and reaction are equal and opposite.’ Man was formed in the image of the God of the Bible, and when he, man, breaks the just laws of that God, God punishes him as he deserves. So the human race went on for many generations, till seeing their misery the Kind Father sent His Son to live among men and heal their sins and diseases. Jesus and His Father are nowhere clearly defined or differentiated. They represent Grace, a third Principle, distinct from Matter and its Laws.

To Marcion, Jesus was not born: He appeared in Judaea in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, as the Gospel says, and went about doing good among men. After a while the God of Law instigated Jesus’s enemies to kill Him. But death had no power over Jesus. He appeared alive at the right hand of the God of Law and pointed out that He, Jesus, had only done good to men: the God of Law was guilty of His death. For this the God of Law, according to the Law itself, deserved to die, but Jesus agreed to take in exchange the souls of all those who accepted the Christian Gospel. So He descended again and revealed to Paul, the only true disciple, that we have been ‘bought with a price.’

It is easy to pick holes in this fantastic scheme, as indeed Tertullian and Epiphanius and other Church writers did. But it is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of Marcion for the development of the Church. In the first place, the rival Church that he founded lasted for centuries. Its organization was very much that of the Great Church, so like, in fact, that it is thought probable that he was a pioneer and that many features of the Catholic hierarchy were adapted from the Marcionite system. It is certain, at least, that the Marcionites produced their share of martyrs, for instance the presbyter Metrodorus, who met his death in the Decian persecution.

The sacramental theory of the Marcionites, which refused baptism and the Eucharist to married persons, we meet with again in the Syriac-speaking Church of Mesopotamia. But some words must here be given to the Marcionite Bible, which is very closely connected with the origin of the Canon of the New Testament. Marcion rejected the God of the Jews as his God, and rejected the Old Testament which told him of that God. He made great use of it, it is true, in his story of the formation of Adam, but it had for him no authority’. He was ’left without a Bible. In its place he put an account of the words and deeds of Jesus, and a collection of the writings of His true apostle Paul.

The elaborate investigations, made during the nineteenth century, of the relation of the Marcionite Gospel to the tale told by Luke in his First Volume (i.e. the gospel) have substantially confirmed the allegations of Tertullian and Epiphanius, that Marcion took Luke and arbitrarily altered it, mostly by cutting out incidents which he regarded as Jewish perversion of the true Gospel. Where the Church Fathers are wrong is in their natural assumption that Marcion chose out one of the four Canonical Gospels and mutilated it. In Marcion’s day these Works existed, but they were not yet ‘canonical.’ It is likely that Marcion regarded his procedure as that of extracting from a bulky historical work those records of the Lord Jesus which seemed to him to be genuine.

Marcion’s Apostoliconconsisted of ten letters of Paul, the collection familiar to us, minus the Pastoral letters (and of course Hebrews), but including Philemon. The earlier history of the Pauline Epistles is obscure and the occasion of their first collection as a Corpus is uncertain. Some of the Pauline Epistles were in general circulation before the end of the first century. Clement of Rome clearly knew and used Romans and at the appropriate moment he bids the Corinthians ‘take up the Epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle’ in which the Apostle had charged them concerning the evils of partisanship. Ignatius, likewise, certainly knew I Corinthians; he probably knew Ephesians also, and he may have known other Pauline letters. Decisive evidence is lacking, but it is not unlikely that a collection of Pauline Epistles, of the same compass as Marcion’s, was already in existence when Ignatius wrote. There is, at any rate, good reason to think that the compiler of the Pastoral Epistles was familiar with the rest of the Pauline Corpus in its entirety. But for Marcion—now left without the Bible of the Church, that is the Old Testament—the writings of Paul the one true Apostle attained a new position of paramount authority. True they, like St Luke’s Gospel, could not be accepted as they stood, but required to be purged of many a judaizing corruption. Thus purged, they were made to form a second constituent part of Marcion’s new Canon of Scripture. Marcion was the first formally to ‘canonize’ the Pauline Epistles.

The Catholic Church could not fall behind the heretic in the authority which it bestowed upon the writings of the Apostle. For it too the Pauline Epistles became Scripture. Indeed, there is evidence that Marcion’s edition of the Pauline letters directly influenced the New Testament of the Catholic Church.

A Life and Sayings of Jesus and a Collection of Pauline Letters —here we have the germ of a New Bible. The Church followed Marcion’s lead. But whereas Marcion made his ‘Gospel’ and his ‘Apostle’ a substitute for the old Bible, the Church got its larger collection of apostolic writings as a New Testament alongside the Old Testament.

 

II.

MONTANISM AND THE NEW PROPHECY

 

In the first Christian communities as we know them from the books of the New Testament we find prophets taking a leading part in the common life and holding a place second only to that of the Apostles. A prophet speaking under the direction of the Spirit has a recognized claim on the acceptance of the Church. The first Epistle to the Corinthians shews the Apostle Paul seeking to guide and control the enthusiastic utterance of the prophets. The prophetic ministry appears to have maintained its place in the succeeding generation: the Apocalypse is a literary movement of Christian prophecy in the closing years of the first century, and Ignatius of Antioch, himself a bishop, speaks under the influence of inspiration.

The writings of Irenaeus illustrate the changes which had passed over prophecy in the Church by the later decades of the second century. Irenaeus has very little to say about Christian prophets; his main task had been to stem the rising flood of gnostic heresy and for this purpose he relied upon the appeal to apostolic tradition. At the same time ne has no doubt that the prophetic gift continues in the Church; he appeals to the now canonized texts of Paul which speak of men and women prophesying in the congregation, and finds it necessary to warn his readers of the danger of expelling prophecy from the Church. Some time before Irenaeus wrote prophecy had ceased to occupy the place it once had held. Already in the Didache it is plain that while in principle the highest veneration and respect is still accorded to the prophet, the danger of imposture is acutely felt, and the local ministry is tending to take over rights and duties formerly associated with the prophet. The first enthusiasm has passed. In Hernias, the Roman seer, we can detect the gradual dying down of inspiration. It is difficult not to feel that his work known as The Shepherd covers more than half a life-time. In the first ‘Visions’ we have the experiences of an ecstatic, not always quite coherent; in the long ‘Similitudes’ at the end we have moral and dogmatic teaching set forth in wearisome and laboured parables, without literary charm and only redeemed by their obvious sincerity and their manful grappling with difficult problems.

It is likely that the decline in prophecy was not everywhere equally pronounced. There have come down to us from the earlier decades of the second century the names of an Asiatic prophet Quadratus, and a prophetess Ammia of Philadelphia, and this may indicate that the ministry of prophecy had maintained itself more effectively among the churches to which the prophet John had once addressed the letters of the Apocalypse. It was at any rate in Phrygia that a new prophetic movement flared up in the latter half of the second century which set problems to the Church leaders in the chief centres of the Christian faith throughout the world. There can be little doubt that Montanus and his prophecy was in the mind of Irenaeus when he so plainly vindicated the legitimacy of prophecy within the Church. Not that Irenaeus was ever himself an adherent of the new movement, but he had taken part in an attempt at reconciliation in connection with Montanism, and his words shew that he was deeply concerned at the reaction which Montanism had provoked.

The ‘New Prophecy, as Montanism was often called, was generated in the vivid expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of Christ on earth, which filled the thoughts of many Christians of this period. When Gratus was proconsul of Asia, Montanus, formerly perhaps a priest of Cybele, fell into a trance at the village of Ardabau in Mysia near Phrygia soon after his conversion, and prophesied in the power of the Spirit. Two women, Priscilla and Maximilia, were later likewise struck with the prophetic afflatus. These left their husbands and joined themselves to the mission of Montanus.

Our knowledge of the original Montanism is derived almost entirely from the hostile reports of contemporary Asiatic Church writers from whose works Eusebius has happily preserved extensive extracts. Tertullian—the one convert to Montanism of first-rate importance—provides us with evidence of Montanist belief and practice in Africa at the beginning of the third century. But except for scanty fragments preserved mainly in Tertullian and in Epiphanius, the collections of Oracles, which for Montanist believers had the authority’ of direct revelations, have perished. Slender as the sources of our knowledge are, they vet enable us to recover the main characteristics of the teaching and mission of Montanus and his associates.

The fundamental convictions of the New Prophecy in its earliest form were, first that the Heavenly Jerusalem was shortly to descend upon the earth—its arrival was expected at the little Phrygian township of Pepuza—and that Montanus himself was indwelt by that Paraclete of whom Jesus had promised that He should come after Him to carry on His work. Concerning the Paraclete Jesus in St John’s Gospel had said: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now; but when he, die Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth’. These words afforded a scriptural basis for the Montanist claim, which so shocked the common sentiment of the Church, that the apostolic teaching—nay the teaching of Christ Himself-—was incomplete and that a fuller revelation had now been vouchsafed which the Church was called upon to accept. Yet bolder language is attributed to Montanus: Epiphanius quotes him as saying: ‘I am neither an angel, nor a messenger, but I am come the Lord God, the Father.’ There is probably some misunderstanding here. Montanus no doubt thought himself to be the medium through which God spoke, but it is unlikely that he thought himself to be personally God. His own view of the divine activity is expressed in another oracle: ‘Behold man is as a lyre and I hover over him as a plectrum. Man sleeps, and I wake; behold it is the Lord who removes the hearts of man and gives them [other] hearts.’ The leaders of the movement thought of their mission as the final phase of revelation. ‘After me,’ said Maximilia, ‘there shall be no prophetess more; then will be the end?

The tense expectation of the coming Judgment was associated in Montanism with an ascetic rigorism which accentuated ten­dencies already powerful in the Church. The martyr’s death, though it was not to be directly courted, was not to be eluded by flight. With respect to fasting Montanus strengthened the prevailing requirement, making the Wednesday and the Friday fasts obligatory and extending their duration. Again, the Montanist Churches prohibited second marriages, agreeing in this with an earlier Christian tradition which regarded second marriage as ‘fair-seeming adultery. Of Montanus it is said by an early antagonist that he ‘taught the dissolution of marriage,’ and it seems likely that the movement in its early stages discouraged, if it did not actually forbid, married life. Maximilia and Priscilla had left their husbands. The strength of similar tendencies within the Church is well illustrated by the Apocryphal Acts of John, of Peter and of Paul, which emanated from Asia Minor in the second half of the second century.

In general the temper of the movement was conservative and orthodox. Enemies admitted that they held the articles of the common faith of the Church. If there was a tendency to Monarchianism among a section of the Montanists, this was no Montanist peculiarity. They venerated the same scriptures as the Church, and they had no quarrel with the Church’s hierarchy as such. When they were forced into the position of a separate sect they appear to have carried on the threefold ministry of the Church while imposing upon it the superior orders of Patriarchs (resident at Pepuza) and Associates. Yet to the great Church now organizing itself into a hierarchy of authority, the fundamental claim of Montanism inevitably wore the aspect of a challenge. If the Paraclete directly declared the will of Christ through Montanus, authority was powerless. Here is the his­torical significance of Montanism: it was this claim which more than anything else roused the episcopacy of Asia to a fierce con­demnation of the New Prophecy. Montanism could not meet that attack: its power was broken in Central Phrygia but it may well be that withdrawing from the cities it strengthened itself among the peasantry. In the villages of the Tembris valley there are funeral monuments dating from the third century, which differ from other Christian monuments in Phrygia, whereas in other monuments Christians were content to veil their Christianity in neutral formulae, the makers of these monuments boldly professed their faith as Christians addressing Christians. It has been conjectured that they were Montanists.

Montanism forced the Church to wrestle with the problem of the legitimacy of ecstasy in prophecy and the place of prophecy amongst orthodox Christians; it contributed towards the establishment of a closed canon of scripture to which no new revela­tions could be added. This is an idea which in the last quarter of the second century found expression in the works of Irenaeus and the so-called ‘Muratorian Canon,’ which enumerates the books of the New Testament and ends by condemning the Cataphrygians? Again, the wide sphere which Montanism had opened to woman within the Churh led the Catholics anxiously to maintain the restrictions which St Paul had set upon the public ministry of women. Thus the challenge of the New Prophecy did but serve to strengthen the hierarchical government of the Catholic Church. It is in connection with the opposition to Montanism that we first hear of the summoning of Church councils. The believers in Asia, we are told, held frequent meetings with regard to the New Prophecy, and after testing the utterances of the prophets agreed to excommunicate its adherents. This was a momentous innovation: through these assemblages guided by the Holy Spirit the Church gained a new realization alike of its unity and its strength.

The strenuous opposition of the leaders of the Church prevented the New Prophecy from winning the acceptance which it sought of the Church at large. Against its own will and intention, Montanism became a sect. As a sect it had a long history. In the West it appears to have declined rapidly in influence. After Tertullian not a word is heard of Montanism at Carthage. It may be that here, as perhaps elsewhere, Montanists fused with the like-minded Novatianists. But later, in the fourth century, there were Montanists at Barcelona as well as at Rome. The corporate existence of the sect at Rome was probably ended by a decree of Honorius in a.d. 407. In the East Montanism fought harder and lived longer. Clement of Alexandria found it necessary to refute the heresy, and Origen also takes occasion to discuss and repudiate its claims. In the fourth century it counted many adherents in Asia Minor and had found a foothold in Constantinople. Like other heretical bodies it fell under the ban of the Christian emperors, and though a last echo is heard as late as the ninth century, it was probably virtually extinguished by the persecuting legisla­tion of Justinian, under whom the Montanists in Phrygia shut their Churches with themselves inside and set fire to them over their heads.

 

III.

THE APOLOGISTS

 

Early Christian apologetic was the outcome of persecution: it was because ‘certain wicked men were endeavouring to molest our people’ that Quadratus presented to Hadrian the first Christian apology. It is to protest against the injustice of the Roman State in regarding the confession of the Christian faith —the nomen Christianum—as a punishable offence, to meet the popular charges of ‘atheism,’ cannibalism, and Thyestean orgies that in succession the Apologists composed their defences of the Christian revelation. In these writings the hated sect appeals against the judgment of the Roman world.

The Christian Apologists of the second century thus possess a significance out of all proportion to their intellectual ability or to the intrinsic literary merits of their works. With them the Christ­ian Church enters for the first time into the common world of literature and culture. The writings of the first age of Christianity were directed to the guidance and edification of the faithful: a contagious missionary movement had spread itself in the main centres of commercial and political life and won adherents chiefly, though not exclusively, among the lower social strata of society.

Bound together by an intense and enthusiastic conviction, these newly converted believers had not yet found it necessary to state a case for their faith in order to conciliate the instructed opinion of the unconverted world. It is indeed possible that some such aim was not entirely unfamiliar to the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts. But even the Lucan writings, like all the rest of the New Testament literature, and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, are primarily intended for, and would only be intelligible to, a believing public. The Apologists, on the other hand, de­liberately aimed at influencing the opinion of the world. A new culture is beginning to take shape. The Christian Church has become conscious of itself as a ‘third race,’ alongside pagans and Jews; and it seeks to win public recognition and legal toleration from the powers that be.

The Apologists presented their faith in the guise of a new and superior ‘philosophy’ which claimed to supersede the rival and contradictory philosophies of the pagan world. They' address themselves to the world at large, or—more frequently—to the reigning emperor. Whether or not such writings ever reached the hands of the emperor himself may be doubted. But even if this style of address is to be regarded as mere literary form, it is none the less significant of the apologetic aim. The Christian Church is coming to think of itself as the bearer of a world religion, related to the worldwide empire of Rome. Thus, one of the later Apologists, Melito of Sardes, addressing Marcus Aurelius, speaks in these terms of the Christian faith: ‘A philosophy which formerly flourished among the barbarians, but which during the great reign of your ancestor Augustus sprang up among the nations which you rule, so that it became a blessing of good omen to your Empire.’ ‘To this power,’ he continues, ‘you have succeeded as men have desired; and in this power you will con­tinue with your son, on condition that you guard that philosophy which has grown with the Empire, and which came into existence under Augustus.’ He affirms that Nero and Domitian alone of the successors of Augustus had been misled into a policy' of hostility’ to the Church, Melito expresses a conviction of which the writings of the Greek Apologists were at once a symptom and a cause.

There is little that is original in these apologies. Christianity was following in the wake of Judaism, and though actual dependence upon particular Jewish writings can seldom be established, certain main themes have been taken over from the propagandist literature of Hellenistic Judaism. Christian and Jewish Apologists alike maintained the superior antiquity and originality of the Jewish scriptures as against the writings of the Greeks, and argued that the classical writers of Greece had borrowed from Moses. Christian Apologists, no less than Jewish, were concerned to pour scorn upon the idolatrous practices and the immoral mythologies of paganism. Again, Hellenistic Jews had anticipated Christians in drawing upon the language and ideas of current popular philosophy, to explain and commend their religious beliefs. But while the Christian Apologists laid under contribution the literature both of Jews and Greeks, they were not the less loyal to the main convictions of the primitive Christian faith. While the use of popular philosophical ideas enabled them to establish contact with the world at large, these ideas are never substituted for the tradition of the Church. The two streams run side by side. The ethical standard of the Christian Church is steadfastly upheld; there is no wavering in their conviction that the Old Testament Scriptures are directly inspired by the Divine Spirit, and that the prophecies contained therein have been fulfilled in the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ; lastly, the general belief of the Church of the second century, that this same Jesus is to come again to judge the world, and to inaugurate a millennial kingdom upon earth, maintains its ground.

Indeed it is not in the inherited material, but in the faith which has turned this material to its own uses that the interest lies. Here is the triumphant proclamation of a new freedom—a liberation from the oppression which weighed so heavily upon the pagan world of that day. Man was no longer the victim of the malice of the countless demon powers which beset his life: the victory over the demons had been won once and for all time, and that victory could be appropriated by the humblest Christian through faith. The numberless gods of the pagan pantheon were but a demonic delusion: there was but one God, and the Divine Word issuing from that God offered to all men release from subjection to arbitrary and immoral deities. The message of Good Tidings came to the convert as a mighty liberation, precisely as it did in the beginning of the Church’s history. The stars in their courses (so pagans declared) determined the life of man and there was no escape from inexorable Fate: here again the Apologists can claim to bring to the pagan world release, for they can assure man that despite the stars he is the master of his own soul and that his will is free: with himself rests his destiny—whether he claim an immortality of bliss or choose a punishment which shall have no end. One can still catch the thrill of this declaration of independence, by which, through faith, the convert could pass from the prison of a determinist universe.

Through these early apologies there runs a democratic exultation: this gospel of liberation is not confined to the cultured few, it is no aristocratic gnosis. It appeals to women as well as men, to young and old alike, to rich and poor, to the slave as well as to the free man. It is indeed a catholic proclamation. As ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ all can find a place in the family of the Christian faith. It is easy to ascribe too great an importance to the terminology through which the message is expressed: naturally the Apologist employs the common language of the culture of his day. Some converts were formerly pagan philosophers, and philosophers they remained after their conversion. Christian theology was still in the making and the theological thought of the Apologists is tentative, exploratory. For the pagan of the second century his philosophy was essentially religious, and the motive force which drives the Christian convert to present his faith in philosophic guise is throughout a religious conviction. The modern reader misses a reference to the Gospels, but the ‘memoirs’ of the Apostles were but lately written: they lacked the authority which was generally attributed to antiquity. It was a far more cogent argument to appeal to those more ancient scriptures—the writings of the prophets confirmed as they were by the recent fulfilment of their prophecies. The faith which was born under Tiberius—a faith but of yesterday—had its roots in an immemorial past; before there was a Greece there was Christianity.

The earliest Christian apology—that of Quadratus we no longer possess. Eusebius, indeed, declares that it was addressed to Hadrian, but its date and place of composition remain uncertain. The earliest surviving apology is the recently recovered work of Aristides, a ‘philosopher’ of Athens, which Eusebius states was, like that of Quadratus, addressed to Hadrian: many scholars have thought that in view of the Syriac translation’s heading ‘To Adrianus Antoninus’ that it was to Antoninus Pius that the apology was presented. Aristides writes in an artless style, and his thought is as simple as his language. Beginning with a rational argument for the existence of God, he proceeds to review the three great types of religion, Paganism, Judaism and Christianity. The greater part of the book is taken up with a polemic against the false pagan cults of Chaldaeans, Greeks and Egyptians. In contrast to the polytheistic heathen the Jews recognize the One True God; yet they, too, have gone astray in the practice of their faith, which is rather a worship of angels than a worship of God. Aristides then turns to the Christian religion. He attempts no reasoned defence of the new faith, but is content to describe who the Christians are; whence they are derived; who Jesus Christ was, and what are the commands which He has ‘graven in the hearts of Christians.’ Finally, he proclaims the judgment which God is to bring upon the world.

The extensive genuine works of Justin give the best picture of the attitude of second-century Christians to their chief opponents. In his apology he begins by asserting that Christians are not ‘atheists,’ as was generally supposed; their morals are excellent, following the ethical teaching of Christ, which is illustrated by extracts from the Gospels (mostly from Matthew and Luke); Christ was spoken of by prophets who had lived centuries before Him. Those who are persuaded that the truth is with the Christians are admitted to their Society by a bath, called also ‘illumination’ and ‘rebirth,’ and are then allowed to partake of the Christian ritual meal called ‘Eucharist,’ which is described in general terms. It takes place on Sundays after they have read in their sacred books and heard a discourse from their president. Justin has already mentioned that they prayed for the Imperial power.

In the other chief work of Justin, the Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, we have Justin’s attitude towards the Old Testament. At the opening of the first apology Justin had expressed the main lines of his theology: Christians are not ‘atheists,’ they worship the Creator of all things, put their Master Jesus Christ in the second place, and the prophetic Spirit in the third. In the Dialogue this theory is expanded. Christ is the Word (Logos) of God, who sometimes appeared in various forms to Biblical heroes of old time, in the shape of a man to Abraham, as fire in the bush to Moses, and finally was born as a human being of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified and rose again. Before this the Divine Spirit, speaking by the Hebrew prophets, had predicted many of the events which were to happen in His earthly life. This ‘Word’ of God is distinct from the ultimate, invisible Creator.

Justin is here making use of a term current in popularcontemporary philosophy, where it provided a mediating principle between the Supreme God, and the phenomenal world. By its means he is able to give an intelligible interpretation of the Biblical revelation, and supremely of the Person of Jesus Christ Himself; while at the same time he is able to explain the partial revelations, which, as he holds, have been made to other peoples. All good and holy men of whatever race have been inspired by the same Logos, and thus Justin is able to claim that whatever has been truly said by the sages of all peoples—Socrates and Plato, for instance—belongs of right to the Christians. The Logos doctrine as it appears in Justin is undeveloped. Justin is not a great thinker, and he does not see that his theory of the ‘Spermatic’ Word, present in some degree in all mankind, makes superfluous his alternative theory that Greek wisdom is historically derived from the Prophets of the Old Covenant. But though it is easy to point to inconsistencies and inconsequences in Justin’s thought, it was none the less a momentous step when Justin raised for Christian theology—almost by accident—the perennial problem of the relations between faith and reason, ‘natural religion’ and revelation.

The long Dialogue with Trypho ends with friendly speeches; it is not stated that Trypho is converted to Christianity. The object of the work is mainly an expression in dialogue form of Justin’s own theology, and thereby of the Church’s attitude to paganism on the one side and to Judaism on the other. As against Judaism the Church was determined to hold on to the Old Testament, interpreting it from a Christian standpoint The Christian’s Master was born a Jew; Justin is persuaded that the Israelite sacred Book spoke of Him, it is therefore the sacred Book of the Christians; in fact, the Christians are the true Israel and the Jews are ignorant and blinded heretics. The sacred Book gives the true origin of man and the earth, and the true account of what will happen in the future. Justin is not afraid to find elements in the Graeco-Roman mythology which illustrate the relation of Christ to the Father of all, but in general he borrows little from heathen religion or heathen science. He holds firm to the original Christian expectation of the coming judgment, the coming resurrection of the just and the coming thousand years of their glorious reign in Jerusalem.

The ‘Address to the Greeks’ of Tatian (date uncertain, perhaps c. a.d. 165), Justin’s disciple, is written in a different temper. Tatian was a Syrian by birth; and he is animated by a hatred of the Greeks and of Greek culture. The barbarian origin of the Christian religion is in its favour. He convicts the Greek religion of immorality, and the Greek thinkers of error and radical inconsistency; at great length he establishes that Moses had lived before the Trojan War and the Heroic Age; and argues that the Greeks had misunderstood and misused the Old Testament revelation. The Logos doctrine is less prominent than in Justin and—here again unlike Justin—he manifests a rigorous, ascetic temper which led him eventually to break with the Great Church. From a literary point of view Tatian’s work marks an advance upon his predecessors, since, for all his contempt for Greek culture, he knows how to use the arts of Greek rhetoric to confound his pagan adversaries.

Athenagoras of Athens, a contemporary of Tatian, in his Supplication concerning the Christians addressed, it would seem, to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus (date uncertain, but probably c. a.d. 177) sets himself to disprove the calumnies popularly believed of the Christians: in turn he rebuts the charges of atheism, cannibalism and incest. The work is better constructed than that of Justin and he writes far more temperately than does Tatian. He employs an atticizing Greek and makes some pretension to literary style. He is not unmindful of the virtues of die Greek sages, and argues that if Christians now are persecuted by their neighbours that is no more than befell Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus and Socrates. But he, too, finds the Greek philosophers inconsistent: Christianity is for him the true philosophy which has superseded the confused speculations of the Greeks. The peculiar interest of his work lies in the picture of the life and character of the early Christian communities and the influence on both of a belief in a bodily resurrec­tion. The tone of the Apology is well reflected in its closing words: ‘For who are more deserving to obtain the things they ask than those who, like us, pray for your government that you may, as is most right, receive the kingdom son from father, and that your empire may extend and increase, all men becoming subject to your sway? And this is also for our advantage that we may lead a peaceable and quiet life and may ourselves readily perform all that is commanded us.’

Last in the roll of the second-century Apologists is Theophilus, who held the see of Antioch in the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Of the many works which he is known to have written, the apologetic work Ad Autolycum alone has come down to us. This Apology, written in flowing and easy Greek, was composed some time after the death of Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 180). It is the longest and most ambitious of the second-century Apologies, but it adds little that is new in this type of literature.

 

IV.

THE GNOSTICS

 

The future of the Christian Religion, and with it the future of civilization, was destined to go upon lines not very different from that of Justin Martyr’s synthesis. But meanwhile other formula­tions of Christianity were being made, formulations which neglected the Old Testament and started from the current philosophy and the current science. Such were the speculations of Valentinus and Basilides and the other schools commonly known as gnostics.

Two theories underlie these theologies: one is the Ptolemaic system of Astronomy, the other is the belief in the immortality of the soul, imprisoned in a mortal body. The first of these led to belief in the various systems of Astrology, the second to the doctrine expressed in the Greek catchword soma sema ‘the body a tomb.’ These two theories are quite independent of Jewish and Christian ideas, but were widely spread in the classical world in the first two centuries of our era.

What is the shape of the World? The ancient view, attested among other authorities by the Old Testament, is that it was not unlike an old-fashioned trunk. Up above, covered by a curved top, was the Kingdom of Heaven. Below was the Earth, with pillars at the corners supporting the heavens, with the abode of the dead underneath. In modern days we believe in the Copernican system, in which the ball of the earth goes round the Sun, itself a mere member of the Milky Way. Neither Heaven nor Hell can be a part of the phenomenal universe, as they were to the ancients. Between these two views comes the Ptolemaic System. It still regarded the Earth as the centre of all things, but in so far as it differed from the old system it was founded upon scientific observation, upon agreement with observed facts. Whatever men might believe, there remained always the impressive spectacle of the fixed stars, revolving night after night round the Pole. These, once their invariable configuration had been noted, must be thought of as fixed in a rigid though transparent sphere rotating round the Earth. And if the stars are fixed in a sphere of this kind, it seemed reasonable to explain the more unaccountable movements of the other heavenly bodies in a similar way. There must be similar spheres for the Sun and for the Moon and for the Five Planets. If these were fixed in their spheres, their spheres must move irregularly.

The believer in the Ptolemaic astronomy had therefore come to regard the Earth on which he lived as surrounded by crystal, transparent, but rigid, spheres, as the heart of an onion is encased by its outer layers. This view immensely enhanced the importance of each planet. It was no longer a tiny point of light mysteriously wandering among the other heavenly bodies, but was the Lord of a Sphere which encased the Earth itself. If it was high or low above the ground, nearer or further from other heavenly bodies, it seemed reasonable to suppose that it exerted a special influence on the Earth and its inhabitants. And along with this belief there was another, intimately bound up with the scientific character of the Ptolemaic system. Whatever might be the rules of the courses of the planets, the very observations that had led to the construction of the system had taught the comparative regularity and inevitableness with which the heavenly bodies, planets included, do move. If then the planets (or their spheres) had an influence on men, that influence came inevitably and inexorably. Astrology, the natural child of Ptolemaic astronomy, is a doctrine of Fate, of inevitable and inexorable Fate.

The soma-sema doctrine may be described as the reverse or back-view of the Immortality of the Soul. The immortality of the human soul is not a doctrine taught in the Bible, either in the Old or New Testament. A vivid belief that the God of all the earth will in the end do right led most Jews to believe, from the time of the Maccabaean rising onwards, that martyred saints would not be unrewarded and that notorious sinners and persecutors, such as Antiochus Epiphanes, would receive in their own persons the due punishment for their evil deeds. So arose the belief in the Resurrection of the Dead. It is a moral doctrine, not a physical theory. The Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, on the other hand, is not in itself moral but logical and psychological. The soul of man, the Psyche, the queer inhabitant of the human body that in dreams seems to be able to wander outside at will, only to be imperiously called back on waking, was held by many Greeks to be immortal. But it was imprisoned in a mortal body, like a bird in a cage. This body was of earth, of the same or similar substance as stones and mud and other inanimate things. The soul on the other hand was ‘ethereal,’ i.e. its true nature and abode was the Upper Air, in the pure region high above the clouds. The body enclosed it like a tomb: if only the body were dissolved, the immortal soul was free to mount up to its true home. But, as has been seen, the victorious Ptolemaic system with its attendant Astrology had brought in the Spheres, translucent walls of crystal cutting off Earth from Heaven beyond, cutting off the Soul in its upward flight. How could the Soul get through?

There is yet another problem with which thinkers of this period were occupied. If there be one God, the ultimate Source of everything, how does this variegated and partly evil world come about ? How can One become Two, and part at least of the Two be in opposition to its original ?

Christianity’, the religion which is essentially a belief that ‘Jesus appeared in Judaea’ (to use the phrase employed by Mani) was a divinely-sent Deliverer of man, had first to explain how this Jesus was fitted to the Old Testament, the divine vehicle of truth. But when Christianity had become established in the Graeco-Roman world and was beginning to attract some of the educated classes who were uninfluenced by Judaism, it is the questions sketched above to which ‘Jesus’ required to be fitted. Was it not possible to set forth the role of Jesus in a way that satisfied the cultivated ideas of modern enlightened society ? This is the setting in which the various Gnostic sects appeared.

The most famous of the gnostics is Valentinus, whose activity may be dated about 130—150. He had a number of disciples, who were divided into an Eastern and a Western school. His doctrine survived in Egypt, and both the document called ‘the Apocryphon of John’ and that called ‘Pistis Sophia’ seem to be ultimately derived from Valentinus’ construction. It is with a description of Valentinus’ system, probably as set out by his disciple Ptolemaeus, that Irenaeus begins in his great treatise ‘Against Heresies’; it is mainly from Irenaeus, rather than from the later ‘ Fathers’ who used Irenaeus, that we are able to get a fair estimate of what Valentinus was attempting to enunciate by his curious mythology.

He taught that there was an original Forefather, called also The Deep (Bythos).With this primordial essence dwelt a Thought  (Ennoia) called also Grace, for it was not conditioned, and Silence, for it made no sign of its existence. Somehow the immeasurable Deep made its own Thought fecund, and so Mind (Nous) came into being; and though it was called Unique it had a correlative side to it called Truth. It will be noticed that the Pairs are very much like the Hegelian Thesis and Antithesis that between them bring forth a Synthesis. In other words the Valentinian heavenly hierarchy, known as the Pleroma, is rather philosophical descrip­tion than mythology. After all, human beings only know of two kinds of fresh production: there is the thought or idea that seems to be self-produced from a man’s consciousness, and there is the new individual that comes from generation in plants and animals. By the first process the ultimate Forefather of Valentinian theology conceived His original Thought, and by something analogous to the second the dumb Thought produced what could be called Nous. In other words Nous was ‘begotten, not made? Nous, Mind, is an intelligent Understanding, the inevitable counterpart of which is Truth. For if there be nothing true to understand there can be no intelligent understanding.

It must also be pointed out that the original Bythos, the hidden Deep that produced the first Thought out of itself, corresponds in many ways to the Subliminal Self of modern psychologists. There is in the human personality an inner treasure-house within us, impulses good and bad which proceed not so much from our conscious reasoning powers as from what is called ‘the abysmal depths of personality, i.e. from something corresponding to the Valentinian word Bythos. It was by a process analogous to that by which new notions come into our minds out of the unknown activities of our unconscious selves that the Valentinian Forefather produced His first unexpressed Thought.

Many more pairs of Aeons, according to Valentinus, were formed by a process of a similar kind, the last of which was Design and Sophia. The last is usually translated Wisdom, but a more appropriate English term is Philosophy. As we are soon to learn, Sophia s conduct was not marked by true Wisdom, Sophia took no pleasure in Design. The first Forefather could properly be perceived by Nous alone, by the pure Intelligence. But somehow Sophia had got a glimpse of this exalted Forefather, and she desired to have direct intercourse with Him. This was not designed for her: her search for the Unsearchable was labour and sorrow, and (to continue the tale) her unauthorized passion somehow made her fecund with a formless monster. In pain and terror Sophia cried out for help to be sent to her from the Father and all the Aeons, and so the Father sent to her a new Being called Horos, who separated her from the monster that she had conceived, and restored her to her proper condition among the Aeons. Her monstrous offspring, on the other hand, fell outside the heavenly Society (the Pleroma, and became the cause of this sensible and material world.

It is evident that Valentinus’ account of the origin of things and of the mixture of good and evil found in this our world was psychological, akin to the mental processes of our own mind, which are indeed the only mental processes we know of. ‘Sophia’ is Philosophy. Philosophy sometimes seems to have a glimpse of the Deep, that is, of Ultimate Reality: it desires to have direct touch with Ultimate Reality. The vision of what is ultimate is entrancing but intoxicating. Philosophy cannot conceive it intelligently and produces only disordered fancies. What physician, or rather surgeon, can treat the disordered fancies of Philosophy ? Valentinus’ name for him is Horos, i.e. ‘Boundary,’ in other words true Definition.

Here we come to the most interesting, and at the same time the most Christian, feature of Valentinian doctrine. Horos, we are told, had other names meaning Emancipator, Redeemer, etc., but he is also called ‘Cross’ (stauros), because he ‘crucified away’ the disordered fancies of Philosophy. This is the Pauline doctrine that the believer in Christ Jesus has ‘crucified’ the flesh with the affections and lusts thereof. It is expounded in the Acts of John, a second-century work with ‘Gnostic’ affinities, where we are told that the real effective Cross is the marking-off of all things, a figure not -+- but T, which divides everything below it into ‘right’ and ‘left’ but above it there is no division. The essence of Christianity is contained in the Cross and what Christians have associated with the Cross. No religious theory that does not contain a doctrine of the Cross has a right to the name ‘ Christian,’ though from the beginning it was a stumbling-block, a ‘scandal.’ We have seen how Valentinus incorporates the Cross as the decisive factor in his drama of salvation: it is just this that makes his heresy, however erratic and however unorthodox, a Christian heresy.

The further ramifications of Valentinian cosmogony do not need to be given here in any detail, including the production of the heavenly preexistent Jesus by all the Aeons, so that He has the virtues of all of them, or again the stages in the production of the visible world and the world of men, or the ultimate redemption of Achamoth (as they named the disordered fancy of Sophia) and of those of her offspring who attained to some measure of true knowledge (gnosis). In the evolution, the fall, and the subsequent reinstatement of ‘Sophia,’ or Philosophy, the essential ideas of Valentinus are expressed. There is no intellectual necessity for the fall of Sophia, but both as a Greek and as a Christian Valentinus believed in the empirical fact. As a Greek he held the soma-sema theory, that the better, ‘ethereal,’ part of him was imprisoned in gross matter; while as a Christian he found a doctrine of the Fall of Man, from the effects of which the Son of God had come down to earth to deliver those who received Him. Like Mani after him, Valentinus felt that the Fall must have happened in essence before this world, this mixed world, came into being. The world on this theory is the result of the Fall, the Fall is not a regrettable accident which occurred soon after it came into being. According to Valentinus pure Mind is clear, disordered Mind is ‘foggy’; fog is the beginning of Matter!

The system of Valentinus, given above, is the most notable of all the gnostic systems. But there were others, some elaborations or modifications of Valentinian theory, others combinations of parts of it with theories connected with the numerical values of the Alphabet (similar to what Jews call Gematria), or with elaborations of Christian ceremonies such as the Eucharist. These last are par­ticularly connected with one Marcus, who appears to have combined the Valentinian mythology with various tricks of legerde­main, rather resembling some of the seances of modern pseudo­mediums. The Coptic treatises found in the Askew ms. in the British Museum, known as Pistis Sophia contain descriptions of some of these pseudo-eucharists. These Coptic tracts are later, but they have some sort of connection with Valentinian doctrine: they show the belief that through ‘Jesus the Saviour’ and the mysteries which He institutes the true gnostic, when set free from the body, becomes a ray which cannot be seized by the Archons and rulers of the lower heavens, but passes direct to the regions where it belongs and becomes a part of the One Ineffable itself. ‘Such a man,’ says the gnostic Jesus, ‘is a man in the world, but he is King in the Light. He is a man in the world, but he is not one of the world, and Amen, I say to you, that man is I and I am that man.’

Two other systems demand notice here, that given in the Apocryphon of John and that of Basilides. The Apocryphon of John is the name of a work, fragments of which have been preserved at Berlin for nearly forty’ years. What makes this obscure and fragmentary work particularly important is that it is  obviously the exposition of a gnostic system described and controverted by Irenaeus at the end of his first Book against Heresies. In the Apocryphon Jesus appears in a vision to John the Apostle and reveals Himself as The Father, the Mother, and the Son. The original Source of all things, corresponding to the Valentinian Bythos or Deep, is depicting as dwelling of the depths of His own clear and tranquil light, which is the foundation of the Fountain of the Water of Life. Out of the depths of His own pure essence comes His own Ennoia or Thought, just as in the system of Valentinus, but She is given (without explanation) the name Barbelo. This All-Mother, which occurs in the Pistis Sophia tracts, is always represented as a kindly, sympathetic personage, unlike the oddly-named Demiurge or Archon who formed this material world, called Sabaoth or Ialdabaoth or similar names, which seem to have been derived or corrupted from the Greek Old Testament. Barbelo does not a­pear to have any Semitic derivation: it seems to be adapted from the Coptic belbile, a ‘seed’ or ‘grain’. Thus while Greek speculation traced the first beginnings of things to a Thought or Notion, the more concrete Egyptian mind thought of a Seed.

Basilides, a contemporary of Valentinus, produced an inde­pendent system, which seems to have made a certain impression, but attracted less followers or modifications than the Valentinian theology. Basilides conceived that there were 365 heavens, each superior to the other. Each was less concrete, less material, than the one below it, till at last in the ultimate region, the cause of all those below it, we arrive at what is altogether Nothing! No doubt this queer theory is an attempt to explain how diversity could come out of unity, or the concrete out of the undifferentiated, but the fact is that we do not know, any more than we know the real nature of our own consciousness of ourselves or of other things. The 365 heavens of Basilides seem to be nothing more than an attempt to acquit the Heavenly Power of responsibility for letting this material concrete world come into existence.

V.

IRENAEUS

 

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons at the end of the second century, is a milestone in the history of the Christian Church. He was a native of Asia Minor and had in his youth known Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who was martyred in February, 155 or 156, at the age of 86. This Polycarp is a link between the ‘apostolic’ age, which, so to speak, ended with Ignatius, and the age of Irenaeus, which marks the fully developed Catholic system. It seems that Irenaeus’ statement that Polycarp was acquainted with the Apostle John is mistaken, but he may well have known the mysterious Elder John of Ephesus, who had ‘seen the Lord.’ He must also have known Ariston, first bishop of Smyrna, of whom the same is said, but Polycarp’s immediate predecessor was one Bucolus.

The long period of Polycarp’s episcopacy almost covers the period between the writing of the later books of the New Testament and their acceptance as canonical. This is why the theory that Polycarp’s ‘Epistle’ to the Philippians consists of two letters run together is important. The last two chapters are a short letter written soon after Ignatius had passed through Philippi, before he had arrived in Rome for martyrdom: in the first twelve Polycarp is giving advice in answer to a request and the whole tone is far more appropriate to his venerable old age. It is not surprising, therefore, that in this part Polycarp refers not only to 1 Corinthians but also to 1 Peter (possibly written by his predecessor Ariston of Smyrna), and probably to 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, 2 Thes­salonians, 1 Timothy and 1 John, in other words to a body of writings not unlike the New Testament as finally accepted.

To come back to Irenaeus: he was chosen bishop of Lyons after the persecution there in 177, of which the account, preserved by Eusebius, may be from his pen. During the next ten years appeared his eminently successful treatise known as the Five Books against Heresies. His main argument is that the teaching of the Apostles has been handed on by successors, whose names can be adduced, to the churches of his own time; in particular that the Church was founded in Rome by Peter and Paul and from that day onwards their successors are known, without a break to Eleutherus the present bishop, that there has been complete continuity, and that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the fourfold Gospel of the universal Church, give the true account of Jesus Christ. There is nothing in these of the doctrines of Valentinus or any other gnostic. Along with the Four Gospels Irenaeus appeals to the Acts and to the Epistles of Paul and of John—in a word, to the New Testament. What, judged by these authorities, is apostolic is right; what is not to be found in them is wrong. The development of Christian ideas for the future will tend to be an unfolding—an 'evolution’ in the older sense of the word as opposed to 'epigenesis'—of dicta enunciated by apostles and preserved in approved and therefore authoritative writings.

A word should be said here of the Epideixis, a work of Irenaeus the full title of which is ‘The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching.’ This work, mentioned by Eusebius, was long lost, but turned up in an Armenian version in 1904. It was written about 190, after the Against Heresies, and gives the main beliefs about God and human history held by Irenaeus. Apart from a few curiosities of expression, such as describing the Word and the Spirit as the 'hands’ of the Father, it sounds commonplace nowadays, but that is chiefly because the main lines of Christian theology and of Biblical interpretation followed the same course down to a hundred years ago, down to such books as Line upon Line. In Irenaeus Christian ideas about God and man had attained the outline which later ages did little more than fill in and polish, and the Bible is used to support these ideas by a system of allusion and indication, which to modern notions of the interpretation of ancient documents is strangely fanciful and unnatural.