CHAPTER XIV .

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE EAST

I

GREEK-SPEAKING CHRISTIANITY

 

THE work of Irenaeus of Lyons Against Heresies, published about a.d. 188, is, as was said above, a milestone in the history of the Church. Irenaeus had come from Asia Minor, he was in touch with Rome, he wrote in Greek in southern Gaul, and his work found an immediate public in Egypt. But after his time comes a change: the older centres of Greek-speaking Christianity declined in influence. In the West Latin became the vehicle of Christian thought and writing at Rome as well as at Carthage. The anti-Pope Hippolytus (who died in the persecution under Maximinus Thrax c. 236) is the last spokesman of Greek­speaking Roman Christianity. Meanwhile from Syria and Asia Minor as well as from Greece nothing of importance appeared. But in the first half of the third century Greek-speaking Christianity found new centres in Alexandria and in Palestinian Caesarea, the influence of which was felt throughout the Churches of the East.

The prosperous age of the Antonines had closed in the reign of Marcus with war and pestilence, and thereafter there had set in a period of economic decline and of public disturbance threatening collapse to the civilization of the Empire. This deterioration and the Imperial recovery which came in the last quarter of the century are treated elsewhere in this history. Here we are concerned to notice that it was during this period of imperial disintegration that the Christian Church, in spite of persecution, firmly established itself in the society of the Empire and enlisted in its defence some of the leading minds of the age. There was no abrupt change from the Christianity of the Great Church of the second century, and the Alexandrian Fathers may be regarded as the successors of Justin and the Greek apologists. But the position of the leading writers of the Church in relation to the world about them became wholly different: the important part which Justin played in the internal development of the Church cannot mitigate the judgment that he was a poor writer and a confused thinker very imperfectly abreast of the culture of his age; but in the third century there were scholars and thinkers within the Church who had learned most of what the culture of their age had to give, and who laid foundations on which a Christianized society could build in succeeding centuries. The Alexandrian Fathers, Clement and Origen, were the most illustrious representatives of this new Christian culture, but throughout the empire the social status of the Church was rising, and influential Christian writers in the Greek-speaking empire were not confined to Egypt.

To begin with the writing of history: the familiar apologetic contention of Jews and Christians that the Mosaic writings were anterior to the heroic age of Greece, and were a source used by Greek writers themselves, was now translated into a scientific form which was to provide the framework of historiography for centuries to come. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, already mentioned as the latest of the second-century Greek apologists, makes reference to an earlier work of his owm dealing with the early history of mankind. This book has entirely disappeared and we know nothing in detail of its method. In the next generation, a Christian writer, Julius Africanus, produced a monumental work on world-history which attained a widespread and enduring celebrity. It is still known to us in part from surviving fragments, and also through the medium of the later  of Eusebius, which were largely based upon it. Julius Africanus, born, it seems, at Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), had served for a time as an officer in the army of Severus, and was on terms of intimacy “with the Christian dynasty” at Edessa. Much of his life was spent at Emmaus (Nicopolis) in Palestine. His published writings included an encyclopaedic work entitled Kestoi dealing with a large variety of subjects ranging from military tactics to magic. From a papyrus fragment of the eighteenth book of this work, we learn that Julius was charged with the duty of constructing a library for the Emperor Severus Alexander at Rome in the Pantheon. His Chronicles ngave a synchronistic history of the peoples of the world. The Biblical chronology provided the cadre for the work as a whole, but for the later period he used the reckoning by Olympiads. According to Julius Africanus, the present world was to last in all for six thousand years. Of these six thousand years, three thousand carried the history down to Peleg son of Eber and 2500 from Peleg to Jesus Christ. Thus when the book appeared in the fourth year of Elagabalus, a.d. 221, its readers were encouraged to look forward to a period of some three centuries before the coming of that last millennial period, the Sabbath of the world, which was to succeed the six thousand years of history. If the interval seems short, yet the scheme shows that in the expectation of the author the millennial Kingdom of Christ had retired into a fairly distant future. Apocalyptic Christianity was accommodating itself to a world which was at least temporarily stable.

Together with a new scientific construction of world-history based upon the scriptures of the Christian Church, the first half of the third century witnessed the rise at Alexandria of a Christian philosophy of the universe, founded upon the same authority.

The origins of Christianity in Egypt are wrapped in obscurity. The earliest names associated with the new Faith at Alexandria are those of eminent heretics: Basilides, Valentinus, and the Marcionite Apelles. The Gospel of St John was certainly current in Egypt well before the middle of the second century. Whether or not the other canonical Gospels were received at the same period is unknown. In any event, the Egyptian Christians had an indigenous Gospel of their own, The Gospel according to the Egyptians, and this was tainted with gnostic influence. It has been plausibly conjectured that the earliest Alexandrian Christianity was largely gnostic in character, and that this explains the meagreness of our information as to its history. In later centuries the patriarchal See of Alexandria unlike the other patriarchates maintained relations of close friendship and even a measure of subordination to the See of Rome, and the suggestion has been made that this relationship originated in help which the Roman Church supplied in freeing the Church of Alexandria from heretical domination, and that the later legend of the evangelization of Alexandria by St Mark (unknown to Clement and Origen and still absent from the earliest Latin Gospel prologues) reflects the same mission from Rome to Egypt. Be this as it may, when the Alexandrian Church emerges into the light of history in the later years of the second century, we find its leading teacher Clement at one with the Great Church in acknowledging the Rule of Faith, the fourfold Gospel and a Canon of other New Testament scriptures in the main identical with that received elsewhere. Again Clement and his successor Origen are at one with the Great Church in repudiating the aberrations of the gnostic systems and the gnostic attitude of exclusiveness in relation to the faith of ordinary Christians. But they stand for a new type of Christianity which is zealous to claim the title of gnostic for the fully instructed believer. With this goes a new’ attitude towards philosophy. Whereas the earlier apologists had written mainly in a polemical spirit to defend Christianity against attack and to expose the weaknesses of paganism, the Alexandrian Fathers tend quietly to assume the inherent superiority of the Christian dispensation and make constructive use of a Platonizing philosophy to expound and to elucidate the Church's faith.

These theologians gave their teaching in what came to be known as the Catechetical School. This was something more than a school of instruction for those seeking baptism. It probably grew up as an informal association of pupils around an illustrious teacher. At a later date it came to be a kind of Christian College or University in which oral instruction was given to inquirers of all kinds. Origen incorporated into his educational course the study of logic, dialectic, natural science, geometry and astronomy as a propaedeutic for the higher pursuits of ethics and theology. How far this comprehensive system of education is to be ascribed to Origen’s own initiative, and how far it had its roots in earlier practice, it is scarcely possible to say.

The first teacher of the School to attain fame was one Pantaenus, who is said also to have gone on a missionary expedition to ‘India,’ but his works have not been preserved. His successor, known as Clement of Alexandria, occupied the chair for about the last twenty years of the second century. He describes himself as an Athenian, was a pagan by birth and had picked up a varied knowledge of Classical lore (perhaps rather from extracts and florilegia than from a study of originals), and we have from him a very great part of a sort of Introduction to Christianity that throws a vivid light on the intellectual conditions of the age which witnessed a movement of Greek culture towards the new religion and an influencing of the new religion by Greek culture. The Address to Greekssets forth the attraction of Christianity, the Tutor explains the general way of life and conduct appropriate for Christians, the Miscellanies is an unmethodical collection, mainly concerned with the portrait of the true ‘gnostic,’ i.e. the enlightened Christian who understands from philosophy and intelligence the reasons and true significance of the Christian life.

Clement takes over the familiar polemic against the old mythology and the current defence of the superior antiquity of the Old Testament. But in his hands polemic is subordinate to a quiet insistence upon the educative function of the Logos throughout the history of mankind. The process of revelation, fulfilled when the Logos appeared as man in Jesus Christ, is one in all its stages. Both the Jewish law and Greek philosophy were preparations for that fuller truth which was to come. In his conception of human nature Clement remains close to Platonic tradition. Man is a free being, bearing himself the responsibility' for his destiny. From the beginning of the creation man has received the breath of God’s spirit. To train and perfect this divine gift is the function of the Logos. Deification or likeness to God is the final goal of human life, and in Christ the divine purpose expressed in the words ‘Let us make man after our image and our likeness ’ has already been fulfilled.

Writing for a society more or less leisured and educated, Clement warns his readers at length and in detail against the perils of licence, luxury, and extravagance. Yet he is no foe to the refinements of culture, nor would he have his readers renounce the world. A genuine appreciation of the spirit of Greek culture is discernible in his writings. Christ, Clement teaches, does not exclude the rich man as such from the Kingdom of God; rather would he have him mortify his attachment to the goods of the world and use them for a worthy purpose. The common life is to be Christianized, not renounced.

Clement is weakest on the side of constructive thought. He had intended to complete his trilogy with a Didaskalos, expounding the fuller doctrine of the Revelation of the Word. This he was never able to achieve. His attempts at systematic doctrine are confused, and he habitually falls back in his discursive manner upon the practical duties of the Christian life and the apologetic presentation of the faith wherein his chief interest lay.

The real value of Clement’s writing, apart from his citations of other authors, sacred and profane, consists in the picture that he unconsciously draws of a paganism attracted by the Christian system and willing to accept it if it can be shown to be not inconsistent with a cultivated and enlightened view of the universe, and on the other hand of a Christianity willing to express its beliefs in a way consistent with the best Pagan culture. Of the two beliefs with which we set out, viz. the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ, little is said of the latter, and with regard to the former the method of allegory in Clement’s hands succeeds in making the natural meaning little more than a belief for those who have not attained to what Clement calls a ‘gnostic’ view.

Clement left Alexandria when the persecution of Septimius Severus broke out there, and seems to have died in Palestine. He was succeeded in a.d.203 in the headship of the Catechetical School by the youthful Origen.

Clement has been thrown into the shade by his successor. Where Clement was weak, Origen was strong. In him for the first time the Church found a theologian who united a firm adherence to the Rule of Faith with a mastery of Greek philosophical thought, and who knew how to blend these two strains into a single coherent system. This great achievement created the presuppositions of all the later development of Greek theology. The theologians who called Origen blessed and those who execrated his memory were alike the products of the new Christian world which he, more than any man, had brought into being. Between the age of the Councils and the rude beginnings of Christian theology in the first and second centuries there stands the achievement of Origen, believer, thinker and, albeit uncanonized, saint.

Origen was born in or about the year 185. His parents were Christian. His father, Leonidas, was martyred at Alexandria in the Severan persecution, and Origen was only prevented from joining him by his mother, who hid his clothes. The boy was well educated, and after his father’s death and the seizure of his father’s property by the State, he maintained himself by teaching; a couple of years later, when he was only nineteen, he had begun secretly to instruct pagan pupils in the Faith. Hearing of this, Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, appointed him head of the Catechetical School, now vacant through persecution, a post which he held for many years.

How Origen escaped the persecution is not known, but that is no more curious than the case of Tertullian, or of Konna, bishop of Edessa during Diocletian’s day. His learning and Christian faith are undoubted. So is also his over-enthusiastic zeal, which led him to castrate himself, in a too literal following of Matthew XIX. 12. This act was disapproved, but it did not diminish the affection with which his pupils regarded him, of which we have a proof in the Panegyric addressed to him at a somewhat later time by Gregory known as Thaumaturgus, the Wonder-worker, afterwards the evangelizer of his native Cappadocia, who had come to learn law at Berytus, but, meeting with Origen, became a Christian scholar and eventually a bishop. A long and fruitful period of study and teaching at Alexandria ended in the tenth year of Severus Alexander (232), when a quarrel with Demetrius his Bishop led to Origen’s final removal to Caesarea, where he continued his work as a teacher. He died at Tyre in 253 at the age of sixty-nine, his health broken by imprisonment and torture during the Decian persecution of 250.

Of the immense body of Origen’s writings but a fragment survives in the original. His great apologetic work, the eight books Contra Celsum, has come down to us intact; nine of the forty volumes of the Commentary on St John survive, and eight of the twenty-five volumes of the Commentary on St Matthew as well as some homilies on Jeremiah. We have, too, the florilegium of extracts from Origen compiled by St Basil and St Gregory Nazianzen, called the Philocalia, also treatises on Prayer and on Martyrdom. A larger proportion of his work is known to us only through the medium of Latin translations. Where these can be tested they are shown to have been seriously and frequently altered to suit the exigencies of a later standard of orthodoxy. Especially is this true of the great dogmatic work de principiis, which is known to us as a whole only through the translation of Rufinus. This translation allows us to discern the plan and proportions of the original; but fragments of the original Greek extracted by Justinian as texts to be condemned, together with extracts from the accurate rendering by St Jerome preserved in his letter to Avitus, prove how seriously Rufinus tampered with the text. A restoration of Origen’s own system, securely based upon surviving Greek material and upon Latin translations only where they can be controlled by Greek parallels, is an achievement which has been reserved for the scholarship of this present century.

While still a young man at Alexandria, Origen had attended the philosophical lectures of the founder of Neoplatonism, Ammonius Saccas, and thus gained a thorough knowledge of the philosophical thought of his age. This knowledge he applied to the elucidation of the faith which he had received, and to which he was whole-heartedly devoted. The means whereby he was able to co-ordinate his philosophical system with the faith of the Church he found at hand in the principle of allegorical interpretation of scripture, the method of which he expounds and justifies at length in the last of the four books de Principiis. In the earlier books of this work, he states his system constructively. For Origen as a Platonist philosopher true being is incorporeal being, grounded in the one Supreme God. Eternally with God Himself is the Logos, or Son of God, who, though not God Himself , is yet truly, though subordinately, God. Along with Father and Son, the Rule of Faith taught Origen to recognize the Holy Spirit. These three Beings form a Trinity, but a graded Trinity of three distinct Beings, not a co­equal Trinity within a single ousia. Eternal existence is likewise to be predicated of a number of dependent intelligences, endowed with a freedom of choice, whom God eternally creates through His Logos or Son. Origen then proceeds to deal with the visible material world and the souls which inhabit it. The origin of this world he traces to the falling away of created intelligences from the God who made them in consequence of ‘a satiety of the love and contemplation of God.’ Corporeal existence is a lower stage to which minds top which minds are condemned in consequence of their apostasy. Thus, this our world with its manifold grades of being—angels, the heavenly bodies, men, beasts and demons—has issued from an antecedent fall. From these conditions the Divine Logos, made one with an intelligence which had not swerved from God and which was the human soul of Jesus, brings redemption. After passing through death, Christ has opened to those who follow Him the way of ultimate release from corporeal existence and of return to God. This world of ours, as distinct from the eternal created world, has had a beginning in time. There have been worlds before it, and there will be worlds after it. The endowment of free will, with the possibility which it entails of alienation from God, may be expected to issue in a new fall and a new world. But beyond the temporal succession of worlds is the eternal living Purpose of God, which will be realized in the final restoration of all living souls (including the Prince of Evil himself) into union with the Godhead when the hampering restrictions of bodily existence are laid aside. We may here observe one great innovation upon the Church’s faith as it had been generally accepted in the second century. Origen’s system leaves no room for the expectation of a millennial reign of Christ on earth.

It is plain that this great system is no mere development of scriptural doctrines. Though Origen’s doctrine is very far from being identical with the system of a gnostic such as Valentinus, yet there is a true analogy between Origen’s doctrine of the ante­natal fall of intelligences as cause of the ‘casting down’ of the world, and the fall of Sophia with its outcome as taught by the great gnostic. Again, Origen’s leading doctrine of the Logos is one in fundamental principle with the mediator Logos of later Greek thought. The systematic application of this concept in Christian theology was to entail grave consequences, but these seem not to have become generally apparent when Origen wrote. For all its audacity, it does not appear that his system caused offence when he put it out. The troubles in which he was personally involved sprang from questions of Church order and personal jealousy rather than from doubts as to his doctrinal orthodoxy.

It is congruous with Origen’s conception of the nature of theology that the greater part of his writings took the form of scientific exegesis of the books of Scripture or of more popular scriptural homilies delivered in the congregation of the faithful. The greater part of the surviving Latin translations of Origen is of those works of biblical exegesis. Even where Origen’s system was condemned and neglected, his contributions to exegesis maintained their place. Here too a word must be said. Like others who have been inclined to draw elaborate conclusions from the letter of a sacred text—the Jewish Rabbi Akiba was an instance a century earlier—Origen devoted much attention to the wording of the Hebrew Bible and tried to correct the current Greek version, commonly known now as the Septuagint. He knew a little Hebrew, enough to appreciate the three later Jewish translators, Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. These he incorporated into a work known as the Hexapla, which exhibited in parallel columns the Hebrew Old Testament, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion. The Septuagint column was a revision made by Origen; he corrected certain things, mostly proper names, to agree with the Hebrew, and made certain transpositions with the same object. Besides these alterations he marked with an asterisk (*...) passages not in the Septuagint which he added from Theodotion or Aquila, and with an obelus (÷...) passages found in the Septuagint but absent from the Hebrew.

The Hexapla itself, a colossal work, six times the size of the Old Testament, has perished, but some manuscripts of the Greek Old Testament and some Church Fathers preserve extracts. Part of two vellum leaves, containing a copy of the Hexaplar text of Psalm XXII, survive at Cambridge: they came from the lumber­room (Geniza) of the Old Synagogue at Cairo, as a bit of a palimpsest with Hebrew medieval writing on the top. A compendium of the Hexapla, called the Tetrapla, with only four columns on the open page (i.e. omitting the Hebrew), seems to have been made by Origen, but that also is lost. Large portions of a Syriac translation of the Septuagint column, with many extracts of renderings by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, known as the Syro-Hexaplar, also survive, but the main result of Origen’s undertaking consists in corruptions and interpolations in the manuscripts of the Greek Old Testament, derived from consulting the manuscript of the Hexapla, which for many centuries found a home in Caesarea, in the library founded there by Pamphilus, the patron of Eusebius the Church historian.

It is difficult for modern scholarship to assess Origen at his true historical value. Modern scholarship is essentially critical, Origen is both credulous and unhistorical. Every writing that Church authority allowed him to receive he was willing to allegorize and to interpret as teaching what he considered to be the Church’s doctrine. When a learned contemporary, Julius Africanus, put before Origen serious and indeed incontrovertible arguments for the Greek origin of the story of Susanna, Origen failed to feel their force. Again, he said it would be a disgrace for the Church to have to resort to the Jews for pure texts of the Scriptures!

In the Contra Celsum published in 248, on the eve of the Decian persecution, when Origen was over sixty years of age, we have the greatest of the Greek apologies for the Christian religion. Each of the two antagonists who meet in this work is a worthy representative of his cause. The True word of Celsus had been written under Marcus Aurelius contemporaneously with the earlier Greek apologetic literature. Its author was a pagan imbued with a Platonizing philosophy who was concerned at the rising power of the Christian faith wherein he saw a threat to the stability of society and the State. He rebuts the claims of the new religion; sees in Jesus an impostor who relied on thaumaturgic powers, and urges the complaint that Christianity makes its appeal to a blind faith. He shows himself to be conversant with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and with the actual beliefs of Christians of his time. He does not confine himself to attack, but ends with an appeal to Christians to support the Empire, in whose welfare they have no less interest than their pagan fellow-citizens. Why, he asks, should they not respect its religious observances, even if they are not willing to abandon their own? and why should they not take their share in its defence ?

We have no means of knowing how this book was received when it was published, nor whether it had called forth attention among Christians at the time. Perhaps not. Origen, at any rate, seems not to have known the book until his friend Ambrosius prompted him to write a reply. Origen follows the argument of Celsus from point to point so closely that it is probably possible to reconstruct the original almost in its entirety from his refutation. In spite of a diffuse and somewhat laboured style, Origen’s answer is a noble defence of the Christian faith. He shows himself to be learned in all the wisdom of the Greeks, and while he meets the anti-Christian polemic of Celsus with patience, courtesy and discernment, he does not fail to recognize that there is much in Celsus’ own teaching of which he can approve. He shares his reverence for Plato and accepts the same fundamental conception of the Deity. Even in dealing with Celsus’s criticisms of Christianity, Origen is himself sufficiently Greek in thought and feeling to admit implicitly the force of some of his antagonists’ contentions. If Celsus points the finger of scorn at the crucified Jesus as an impossible Deity for a thinking man, Origen does not reply with a Pauline ‘glorying in the Cross.’ His own presuppositions are so far in harmony with those of Celsus that he takes the line of explaining that the sufferings were a part of the experience of the human body and soul of Jesus, and makes it plain that they are not to be thought to involve the Divine Logos Himself.

In the Contra Celsum, as elsewhere, Origen makes full use of Greek philosophical conceptions to elucidate the Christian faith. But he yields nothing to the spirit and the claims of the pagan State. First and foremost, he is a devout Christian, ready to suffer martyrdom for his faith. Plato himself falls under Origen’s criticism for combining his philosophy with an acceptance of the gods of the State. He himself will make no compromise, and though, with Melito, he can recognize a Providential purpose in the worldwide Empire of Rome, in that it had facilitated the spread of the Christian faith into all lands, he will allow of no unqualified loyalty to the State. Prayers should be offered for a sovereign if he be good, and for soldiers if they are engaged in a just war. If, he further urges, the custom of the Empire exempts the holders of certain priesthoods from military service lest they should incur the pollution of blood, it is not an unreasonable claim that a priestly people which offers pure prayers to God should be released from the same requirement. Their prayers, he argues, will be more beneficial to rulers than help in arms, for by prayer they will be able to confound the demons who are responsible for stirring up war. Nor will Origen make any response when Celsus exhorts Christians to undertake the duties of public office. Christians know of another corporate body (established within each city which has yet higher claims upon their services—a body which is governed by men chosen not for their ambition, but for their modesty.

The reconciliation of Church and State is not yet in view: for all Origen’s knowledge of Greek literature and his indebtedness to Greek philosophy, he is alienated—more profoundly than his predecessor Clement—from the old pagan culture and its champion the pagan State. The spirit of the martyrs was in him, and inspired his life as it sustained his end.

After Origen left Alexandria, the headship of the Catechetical School was given to Heraclas, who afterwards became bishop of Alexandria. His. successor in both posts was Dionysius (248—265), who demands mention as a characteristic representative of Alexandrian Christianity. He was an active and energetic bishop, who endured a persecution, and after returning from banishment found himself involved in the thorny questions of the readmission of penitents who had complied with the orders of the government. From a tale told in Eusebius we see that he was a believer in the almost magical virtue of the consecrated Eucharist. But how far the Church had now travelled from the point from which we started can be gathered from his treatment of the Apocalypse. Dionysius had come across the work of one Nepos, an Egyptian bishop then deceased, called A Refutation of Allegorist, in this work Nepos had set forth the old belief in a Reign of Christ on this earth for a thousand years, attesting it by the witness of the Apocalypse of John. That, or something differing from it only in minor detail, had been the Christian Hope; now it was fading away, and its supporters were held to have peculiar opinions and to interpret Scriptures ‘after a somewhat Jewish fashion,’ i.e. literally and not as an allegory. Eusebius tells us that Dionysius was not content with allegorizing. He was willing to admit that the writer of the Apocalypse had had a real vision and was named John, but he could not have been the John who wrote the Gospel and the Epistles: the style of the Apocalypse (he says) is different, indeed barbarous, and the themes specially characteristic of the Gospel are absent from it. No more able piece of literary criticism is to be found in ancient Christian literature, except the critique of Susanna by Julius Africanus mentioned above. It shews the power of ruling ideas that Dionysius felt himself free to pass so sharp and scientific a judgment upon an early Christian work which had been definitely accepted by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the century before, but which, under the influence of teaching such as that of Clement and Origen, was now out of fashion.

The Churches of Asia Minor were amongst the earliest and most active centres of Christianity, and about the year 190 Polycrates of Ephesus maintained against Victor of Rome the Asiatic custom of celebrating the Lord’s Passion by the days of the Jewish month, even if this custom made Easter to fall otherwise than on a Sunday. Polycrates in his letter to Victor enumerates the great stars of Asia, Philip of ‘the twelve apostles,’ John who lay on the Lord’s breast, besides Polycarp and others.

It is clear that Anatolia (to use the most general term) was then a leading Christian region, but from that day its influence declined. This does not mean that Christianity ceased to be practised or even to spread there, but the epigraphical evidence suggests that it had taken on an unobtrusive form that refrained from offending heathen neighbours by stressing Christian symbols. A fish or a swastika inserted among the ornamentation of a tomb reveals to the modern archaeologist that the monument commemorates a Christian who reverenced ‘Jesus Christ the Son of God’ and His Cross, but to contemporaries it might suggest no esoteric meaning.

A remarkable instance of this tendency is to be found in the inscription of Avircius Marcellus, to whom was dedicated a work against the Montanists. A late and legendary life of St ‘Abercius’ tells how he went miraculously to Rome and healed the emperor’s daughter, giving also the words which he set up on his gravestone. The whole tale seemed quite unworthy of serious notice, but in 1883 Sir W. M. Ramsay found, three miles south of Hieropolis in Phrygia, two pieces of the inscription itself, which therefore is to be regarded as genuine and was probably the source round which the hagiographer constructed his legend. It describes the journey of Avircius to Rome in the West and Nisibis in the East, being received everywhere and given a fish from the fountain and a drink of ‘good’ wine with bread. The inscription Avircius set up in his lifetime at the age of 72, about a.d. 190.

Nearly all scholars are agreed that in this allusive language Avircius indicates to his co-religionists that in all his travels he had been received and admitted to the Eucharist. But the fact that the expressions which he uses are so vague and figurative, some persons even thinking he was a priest of Cybele, seems to go with the declining influence of Anatolia upon Christian thought in the period.

Farther to the East, Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia during forty years of the middle of the third century, was one of the more prominent figures of his time. He was a friend of Origen, whom he induced to pay him a visit in Cappadocia after he left Alexandria. Presently he is prominent in the Council or Synod at Antioch, which was concerned with the conditions on which Christians who had recanted during persecution could be readmitted to the Church. In 256 he answered a letter from Cyprian of Carthage on the rebaptism of heretics.

This controversy has a peculiar interest for the ecclesiastical historian, as it reveals two great principles that had been growing up in the Church. Heretics who had been baptized in the Name of Jesus, who now wished to be reconciled to the Church, should they be baptized afresh? Yes, said Cyprian, and persuaded all his eighty-seven suffragans to say the same. Dionysius of Alexandria agreed, and so did Firmilian. On the other side stood Stephen of Rome. He had on his side two things—the ancient custom, and therefore the authority, of the Roman Church, and the growing belief in the mysterious efficacy of sacraments. In an age when the baptism of infants was coming in, what was the good of it to infants, if it had to be repeated ? If the child had died in the interval, its state would be the same as if it had never been baptized at all. It is to be remembered also that ‘Baptism’ and ‘Confirmation,’ i.e. reception into the fold of the Church and the gift of the Holy Spirit, are both administered by Eastern Christians in the rite known as baptism. Cyprian and Firmilian agreed that the heretics did not have the Holy Spirit; therefore, they maintained, their baptism should be repeated. Years later a compromise was reached: valid baptism must be in the name of the Trinity, not in the name of Jesus only; and the orthodox Church repeated the ceremony when heretics were admitted, not as a fresh baptism, but as a precaution in case some defect had been used by the heretical minister when the penitent was previously baptized.

Firmilian mentions in the course of his argument that he had known of a woman who had actually dared to consecrate the Eucharist with a not unworthy invocation, and had baptized many according to the legitimate rite. How could such baptism be accepted? He evidently considered such an unheard-of monstrosity must prove his case.

No Council or Synod was held in this affair. It was otherwise in the case of Paul of Samosata, in which Firmilian was also concerned. This episode is interesting, in itself, for its political accompaniments, and as a mark of the growing power of Rome. In itself it is interesting, for Paul of Samosata held a view about the nature of Jesus Christ and His relation to God, entirely alien from that held by Origen and Origenists who interpreted the Incarnation in terms of the Logos conceived of as a distinct Being or Person alongside the Being or Person of God the Father. Paul taught that the Logos (whom he seems to have identified with the Holy Spirit) was not a distinct entity, but rather the reason in God analogous to the reason in man. His doctrine of Jesus Christ resembled that of the Roman ‘dynamistic Monarchian’ Artemas, from whom indeed he was alleged to have derived it. Jesus he held was a real man, miraculously born indeed, and deemed worthy to receive a fuller measure of the Divine Spirit than any other man, but essentially human as we are by nature. This type of Christology shocked the prevailing feeling of the age, and induced Firmilian of Cappadocia and certain other bishops to assemble two synods and possibly more in order to condemn Paul’s opinions, and to depose him from the venerable see of Antioch to which he had somehow attained. Unfortunately hardly a word of Paul’s side has survived: it is only from his adversaries that we hear of his dangerous opinions, his arrogant behaviour, and of the scandal of the beautiful subintroductae whom he is alleged to have maintained. He managed, it is true, to avoid condemnation at the first synod in 264, but in 268—Firmilian died, apparently on his way to Antioch—Paul betrayed himself into a dispute with Malchion, a presbyter of Antioch hostile to him, and the bishops, all of them of Origen’s school, pronounced him a heretic to be deposed.

It is instructive to observe that in condemning Paul the Council condemned the use of the very word which in the next century was to become the watchword of orthodoxy on the Person of the Son of God: homoousios. It was natural that they should do so. The Eastern Bishops present at the Council were as a whole Origenist, and as disciples of Origen they held the Logos to be an ousia distinct from, and subordinate to, the ousia of the Father. Paul’s doctrine merged the Logos in the Godhead and the condemnation of homoousios was no doubt intended to rule out this tendency. The decision was to prove a cause of some embarrassment to the champions of Nicene orthodoxy. The fact is that in the next century the doctrinal, issues had shifted. Danger then threatened from an accentuation of the subordinationist element in Origen’s theology. The Logos was left so far distinct from—nay inferior to—the essence of the Godhead, that his true Divinity was imperilled or directly denied. Against such a tendency it seemed necessary to assert what the Council of 268 had denied—the homoousion of the Son with the Father. Neither in 268 nor in 325 had theologians hit upon the distinction in meaning between ousia and hypostasis whereby the later orthodoxy sought to satisfy the legitimate interests of both tendencies in theological doctrine.

Paul’s deposition was not easily achieved. In 268 Roman writs did not run in Antioch. Power was in the hands of Zenobia, and Paul refused to give up the Church buildings. But four years later Aurelian had crushed Zenobia and on being petitioned he assigned ownership to those who could show that they were in communion with the bishops of Rome and Italy. No doubt in this Aurelian had in view the ‘restoring and cementing the dependence of the provinces on the capital,’ to use the words of Gibbon, but his action marks an advance in the prestige of the Western church. The Western bishops prudently agreed with the decision of Eastern brethren in the deposition of Paul of Samosata from St Peter’s former see, and accepted the elevation of Domnus, son of Demetrianus, Paul’s predecessor, to be bishop of Antioch.

A word is due here on the slow but steady advance of an ascetic ideal and the exaltation of virginity among Christians in the ante-Nicene period before the conversion of the Empire. That this ideal had limitations is sufficiently proved by the choice of Domnus, just mentioned, to succeed his father Demetrianus, though there is nothing to suggest that Demetrianus during his sacerdotal career had lived with his wife. The exaltation of virginity is not a vital constituent of Christianity, though the tendency does show itself here and there in the New Testament, e.g. 1 Cor. VII and Apoc. XIV. 4, as well as Matt. xix. 12. But that is explicable by the early Christian idea that the world was just about to come to an end, so that no man, believer or unbeliever, would ever have any grandchildren.

In any case this tendency persisted, and the unmarried life, if strictly continent, became the ideal. ‘ t was not in this world that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful.’ The further discussion of the question is a matter for ethics and philosophy. It is necessary to draw atten­tion to it here, in order to render the organization of the early orthodox Syriac-speaking Church and of the heretical Manichees less extraordinary and fantastic.

 

II

SYRIAC CHRISTIANITY

 

 Christianity east of the Roman Empire dates from about a.d. i 60— 170. The Christian Religion started in an Oriental land, and during the period covered by the Book of Acts the Aramaic-speaking community at Jerusalem may have seemed as important as the little Greek-speaking communities founded by Paul in the maritime or quasi-maritime towns of the Mediterranean. But the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 broke up Jewish Christianity for ever. Jewish Christians survived till the fourth century, but in obscurity.

Hence it came about that for eighty years—nearly three generations—from, approximately, 80 to 160, there were hardly any but Greek-speaking Christians. At the end of that period are found the first beginnings of Latin-speaking Christianity, and Syriac­ speaking Christianity began about that time also. Two traditions of its first beginnings survive, neither entirely trustworthy, but by combining them we may gain some idea of the course of events. Epiphanius declares that Tatian, the disciple of Justin Martyr, went back to his native Mesopotamia after Justin’s martyrdom (perhaps a.d. 165), adding that it was Tatian who composed the Diatessaron. The native Syriac tradition is that Addai, one of the seventy-two disciples of the Lord, was sent to Edessa, converted the king, Abgar the Black, and brought in the use of the Diatessaron. That this tradition places the conversion of Edessa far too early is evident from other parts of the legend which make Palut, ordained deacon by Addai, to be consecrated bishop by Serapion bishop of Antioch (about 180), but the use of the Diatessaron as a substitute for the Four Gospels is confirmed by the practice of the earliest Syriac ecclesiastical writers. Eusebius thought that Addai stood for Thaddaeus: a much more probable conjecture is to identify Addai with Tatian, to regard them as the names by which the same man was known to Greeks and Syriac­speaking people respectively.

Edessa, called by the natives Urhai, the modern Urfa, was a town refounded by Seleucus Nicator in northern Mesopotamia about thirty miles north-west of Harran (Carrhae), and this in the time of Tatian was the capital of an independent buffer-State (Osrhoene) between the Roman and the Parthian Empires. The State was taken over by the Romans in 215, a few years before the collapse of Parthia and the rise of the Sassanians, but when Christianity reached it, it had a king and court who used the native dialect. This dialect is commonly known as Syriac: it is akin to, but different from, the Aramaic spoken in Palestine, that of Palmyra and that spoken by Babylonian Jews and the Mandaeans.

The translation of the New Testament, or parts of it, into this Semitic language is a very notable event. There were Egyptian Christians in the second century, but Coptic translations of the Bible were not made till the third. In the fourth century, as we learn from Eusebius’ account of the Martyrs of Palestine, the Scriptures in Palestine itself were read in Greek and then orally translated into the native dialect. Of the first rendering of any part of the Bible into Latin there is no record: it seems to have happened in the period 150-170, when Latin-speaking Christianity began to be important. In any case Latin was the Imperial language, and some sort of rendering of the authoritative Scriptures into it could not be indefinitely delayed. What is certain is that Latin and Syriac stood for a long while as the only languages into which the Bible had been translated. There was a colony of Jews at Edessa and the neighbouring city of Nisibis: the Old Testament had already been translated by them into Syriac before the days of Addai-Tatian. The Syriac Old Testament used by the Christians is this Jewish translation, slightly revised.

The Diatessaron may very well be regarded less as a last attempt at Gospel-making than as the first of the Versions. The Four Gospels had gradually become sacrosanct, at least at Rome, by about a. D. 150: at the same time, Latin-speaking Christians were beginning to form an increasingly large element in the Church there. Should the Gospels be translated for these? On the one hand, it might seem that translation might diminish the special value of the inspired words, on the other, it was obvious that a knowledge of the contents of the Gospel message was desirable for Latin-speaking converts, if not a necessity. A way out seems to have been found in the production of a Latin Compendium drawn from the Canonical Four, which was called Diatessaron, a musical term which indicated both the sources of the work and the essential harmony of the sources.

In its original form the Diatessaron is no longer extant. But a little before the year 546 Victor, bishop of Capua, happened to find an anonymous Harmony of the Gospels, which he rightly identified as akin to the Harmony of Tatian mentioned by Eusebius in his Church History. Victor incorporated this Harmony into a volume of the New Testament which he corrected with his own hand; he mentions in a preface that he had added an adaptation of the system of parallel references known as the Eusebian Canons, and it is probably through Victor that the wording of the text has been assimilated to that of Jerome’s Vulgate. But the harmonic arrangement is very well preserved.

Certain medieval Harmonies in Dutch appear to be based on an independent copy of the codex found by Victor of Capua. In them and in the text of the Codex Fuldensis itself there are surviving traces of the older pre-Vulgate text which characterized the original compilation.

When Tatian, then, returned to Mesopotamia, where he was known as Addai, this Harmony was ready to his hand. He prepared a version of it in his native Syriac, making such changes and improvements as naturally characterize a second edition. The work itself was suppressed by authority in the fifth century and no copy of the Syriac Diatessaron has survived, but Ephraim Syrus (died a.d. 373) wrote a commentary on it which is extant in an Armenian version, and an Arabic translation exists, in which the wording of the text before translation into Arabic had been assimilated to that of the Syriac Vulgate known as the Peshitta. From these, and some minor authorities, the order of the incidents can be securely made out, always with the same result: Ephraim and the Arabic agree together against Victor of Capua and the Dutch Harmonies, and practically in all cases the Latin order is more primitive (and less satisfactory) than that of the Syriac. The Syriac Diatessaron, indeed, has all the characteristics of a second and revised edition.

As mentioned above, the ‘historical’ work which embodies the native tradition about Addai, the founder of Christianity in Edessa, makes Palut his priest or ‘elder’ to have been ordained bishop by Serapion about 180. ‘Addai,’ therefore, and his mission, cannot belong to apostolic times, but must be placed in the last third of the second century. That is the decisive reason for rejecting the chronology assumed in the work of Meshiha-zeka, a chronicler of the early sixth century, who compiled a biographical list of the bishops of Adiabene from the earliest times. The names of these bishops may be genuine—the first was Pekida—but the lengths of their episcopates and the serious gaps between them seem designed to bring up the establishment of the mission into early post-apostolic times, i.e. into the reputed date of Addai himself. That a Syriac-speaking Christianity was introduced into Adiabene and that there were bishops in Arbela before the collapse of the Parthian Empire (a.d. 226) may be granted, but it is all subsequent to the conversion of the king of Edessa.

No connected account of the early history of Eastern Christianity was written down. All that can be done is to emphasize what seem to be outstanding events. First of all comes the naturalization of Christianity in a Syriac-speaking land. Of the numbers of the converts we know nothing, but an accidentally preserved notice of a flood at Edessa in a.d. 201 mentions ‘the temple of the Christians’ as an important building. More significant is the fact of the conversion of the celebrated Bardaisan. Bar Daisan (in Greek, Bardesanes) was born in a.d. 154. He was a friend of the king of Osrhoene, Abgar IX, and was known in his day as the Aramaean Philosopher. He is said to have been educated by a heathen priest at Hierapolis (Mabbog) and to have become a Christian about 180. His works have mostly perished, for he came to be regarded as a heretic, but a Dialogue on Fate by his disciple Philip survives, in which Bardaisan is the chief speaker, from which many of his opinions can be gathered. This dialogue gives an attractive picture of him, answering at length the difficulties of his followers and showing a wide acquaintance with many departments of knowledge.

It was particularly as an astronomer and an astrologer that Bardaisan was famous. He was the author of a grandiose system of the universe, which is both striking in itself and further important as the basis on which Mani afterwards erected his construction. To Bardaisan ‘God’ is not the Creator and Source of the stuff of which the Universe is made, but the Arranger of it into an ordered Cosmos. God is not the sole Ithya, the sole self-existent Being or Entity; besides God there are the four pure substances of Light, Wind, Fire and Water, and the foul Dark substance. All these are contained in Space, which appears to be the Seventh Entity.

Originally these Entities were in a happy state of equilibrium: then something occurred whereby they were hurled together and mixed, but God sent His Word and cut off the Dark from contact with the pure substances, and from that mixture which came into being from the pure substances and the Dark, their enemy, He constituted this World and set it in the midst, that no further mixture might be made from them and that which had been mixed already, which (mixture) now is being refined by conception and birth until the process is complete. What this doctrine asserts, is that things were originally in equilibrium, that something then occurred to disturb this equilibrium, whereby general disaster was threatened, but that God came to the rescue and confined within certain limits the damage done and provided for its eventual reparation.

This corresponds in a sense to the ordinary Christian doctrine of the ‘Fall,’ but it differs from it inasmuch as it puts the Fall, before the construction of our World—nay more, it makes the Fall to be the cause of this World, not a regrettable incident occurring after this World had been made. In this the Bardesanian doctrine agrees with Manichaeism: in fact, the religion of Mani becomes more comprehensible if the ideas of Bardaisan are recognized as one of its formative elements.

The World and its inhabitants having been the result of a premundane accident, it is not surprising that Bardaisan did not believe in the resurrection of the body. Man, according to Bardaisan, is naturally mortal; it was Abel, not Adam, who died first. Our Lord only raises Souls: the effect of Adam’s sin was to prevent Souls after death from what Bardaisan called ‘crossing over,’ while on the other hand the Life or Salvation brought by our Lord was that He enabled Souls to cross over into the Kingdom, or as Bardaisan also called it ‘the Bridal-Chamber of Light.’ The Body, he said, is incapable of thought, while the Soul is merely ignorant: God places in the Soul the Leaven, i.e. the divine faculty of Reason, where it works by its inherent energy till the whole Soul becomes rational and therefore divine. This Reason he regards as a ‘stranger’ in the Soul, i.e. it is a gift from God, not a mere natural development.

Did Bardaisan know Greek? Or rather, seeing that Bardaisan lived part of his life at the court of Edessa and therefore probably could speak Greek, had he a first-hand knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy? It is difficult to say for certain, but it would seem that he had little or no first-hand knowledge of Greek writings, and that a good deal of the vaguely Hellenic air of the ‘Bardaisanian’ theories opposed by Ephraim, from whom we get most of our knowledge of them, is due to Harmonius, the son of Bardaisan, who is said by Theodoret to have studied at Athens and become familiar with the language and philosophy of Greece. Harmonius adhered to his father’s doctrines, and set them forth in ‘Hymns’; the tradition runs that Ephraim took the metres which Harmonius is said to have introduced into Syriac literature, and turned them into vehicles for orthodox teaching.

That Bardaisan himself was a poet, and in particular that he wrote the splendid poem in the Acts of Thomas known as ‘The Hymn of the Soul’ is more than doubtful. In all that Ephraim quotes from Bardaisan there is a complete absence of the mythic and poetical element. In Ephraim’s Refutations the Aramaean Philosopher appears as a matter-of-fact man of science, a teacher of positive doctrine about the physical constitution of the world in which we live. To us, no doubt, it is science falsely so called, speculations as groundless as his derivations of the names of some of the ancient months from the Syriac of his day. But such as it is, it is positive doctrine about matter and sense-perception; there is no parabolic setting-forth of the meaning of human life or the ways of Divine redemption. Moreover, the attitude of Bardaisan towards life is different from that characteristic of the Acts of Thomas, including the great Hymn. This, like Syriac ecclesiastical writing generally, sets forth an ascetic philosophy of life, and there is nothing ascetic in the attitude of Bardaisan. It is true that he regarded man as naturally mortal, and held that only the immortal soul is redeemed by Christ. But he did not reject marriage, as the Acts of Thomas does. In the Hymn itself there is nothing about marriage or generation, but the food and dress of ‘Egypt’ are regarded as unclean, and not merely as things temporary and perishable.

We may fairly regard Bardaisan as a native product of Syriac­speaking Christianity, but the times were not propitious for free growth and development. A little before a.d. 200 may be placed the ordination of Palut the disciple of Addai by Serapion of Antioch: there can be little doubt that this tradition signifies the incorporation of the mission of Tatian into the episcopal system of the Catholic Church. Probably also it was marked by the translation of the Four Gospels into Syriac, though the Diatessaron was still generally used for a couple of centuries.

In one important respect the custom of the Syriac-speaking Church retained till the fourth century the ascetic ideas of its founder. The heresy of which Tatian is accused is that of the Encratites, those who regarded the married state as incompatible with the Christian life. Except in the views of Bardaisan, just mentioned, this belief was dominant in the Syriac-speaking Church. The words ‘holy’ and ‘continent’ are synonymous. It must not be supposed that these Christians were a body of ‘race-suicides.’ Where they differed from the Christian of today was in their theory of the Sacraments. Aphraates, writing in 337, appears to divide Christians into the ‘Sons of the Covenant’ and the Penitents. The Penitent is the general adherent, who has as yet not volunteered for the sacramental life; the son (or daughter) of the Covenant is the baptized Christian, who is admitted to partake of the Eucharist. Those who volunteer for baptism are to be warned—‘He whose heart is set to the state of matrimony, let him marry before baptism, lest he fall in the spiritual contest and be killed.... He that hath not offered himself and hath not yet put on his armour, if he turn back he is not blamed.’ In other words, the average Christian of this community looked forward to becoming a full Church member only at a somewhat advanced age, and as a prelude to retiring morally and physically from the life of this world. In Aphraates, baptism is not the common seal of every Christian’s faith, but a privilege reserved for celibates, or at least for those who intend to live a celibate life for the future. We meet with a similar organization among the Marcionites and the Manichees.

The traditions current at Edessa contain memories of two persecutions, the martyrdom of Sharbil under Decius and of ‘the Confessors of Edessa’ under Diocletian. The martyrdom of Sharbil, high-priest of Bel and Nebo, though preserved in very ancient manuscripts, is almost wholly unhistorical. The date of Sharbil’s martyrdom is put at a.d. 105, and the details of his conversion by Barsamya the bishop are fanciful in the extreme. What is important is that the worship of Edessa is still represented as that of Bel and Nebo, i.e. the Planets, as in the Acts of Addai, in the Acts which deal with the Diocletianic persecution, on the other hand, the official worship is of the Emperors and of ‘this Zeus.’ The inference to be drawn is that Christianity had in the interval ousted the old native cults, and that what was put before the people of Edessa in the Diocletianic persecution was a foreign official worship ordered by the Imperial authority.

The dates of martyrdom of the Confessors are, for Shmona and Guria, Tuesday 15 Nov. a.d. 309, and for Habbib the Deacon, Saturday 2 Sept. a.d. 310. The three Confessors were apparently the only victims in Edessa of the great persecution, not, it would seem, because the Christians of Edessa and neighbouring towns were few, but for the opposite reason that the Christians were very numerous, and the government was unwilling to proceed to extremities. In Nicomedia, where Diocletian had his court, the persecution broke out in 303 and it rapidly spread to Palestine, but it was six years before anyone was executed in Edessa.

In a.d. 312-13 Konna, bishop of Edessa, began to build the great church which was finished by his successor Shaad. It is noteworthy that Konna escaped the persecution. Nothing more is known of him, but he and Shaad and their successor Aitilaha (i.e. ‘Theodore’) were honourably commemorated on Sept. 3.

From Konna onwards the dates of the bishops of Edessa are duly given in the Chronicle of Edessa, a work which goes down to a.d. 540, but which was evidently compiled from contemporary official records. We learn that the city remained orthodox during the reigns of Arian Emperors, and finally under Rabbula, bishop from 411 to 435, old heretics, such as the Marcionites and the disciples of Bardaisan, were reconciled to the Church. The episcopate of Rabbula is the central point in the history of Syriac­speaking Christendom, the natural division between the ancient and medieval world. It will, therefore, be convenient to conclude this survey of the early period by an account of the two great writers, Aphraates and Ephraim, who belong to the age before Rabbula, and to indicate the main stages in the history of the New Testament in Syriac.

Aphraates (in Syriac Aphrahat) was the Principal—it is almost too early to call him the Abbot—of the Convent of Mar Mattai (i.e. St Matthew) near the modern Mosul. Between 337 and 345 he wrote a series of Discourses on the Faith in answer to an enquirer. The Discourses are twenty-two in number, the first words beginning with the successive letters of the Semitic alphabet, together with a final Discourse ‘On the Cluster’ or the descent of our Lord from Adam and Abraham, giving a kind of general view of religious history. The alphabetical arrangement of the Discourses was a method of preserving their proper order; what we have is no miscellaneous bundle of sermons, but an ordered account of the Christian Religion as understood by ‘the Persian Sage,’ as Aphraates was called.

The result is singularly different from the contemporary theology of the Greeks, both Athanasian and Arian. Aphraates is not unorthodox, but his mind moved along other channels than those of the Greeks. For instance, he treats the Holy Spirit as, at least grammatically, feminine. ‘What father and mother doth he forsake that taketh a wife? This is the meaning: that when a man not yet hath taken a wife, he loveth and honoureth God his Father, and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he hath no other love. But when a man taketh a wife he forsaketh his Father and his Mother, those namely that are signified above, and his mind is united with this world.’ As we see from this quotation, the Christian community that Aphraates has in mind is unmarried, and he seems to know no other. His name for them is Sons and Daughters of the Covenant, a word which in later days became one of the many Syriac terms for monk or kanonikos, but with Aphraates is still the word for a baptized Christian.

At a later period the theory of the Christian life changed. In the Syriac-speaking Church, especially from the time that Christianity became the State religion of the Roman Empire, the mass of the adherents wished to make the most of both worlds. They wished to obtain the benefits of baptism all their lives, and had also their young children baptized in infancy. Thus a Christian community came into being, of which the greater number were actually baptized, though only a minority of them were specially addicted to religion. In this way the Bnai Kyama became a monastic order in the Society, instead of being the Society itself.

Ephraim, in Syriac Apkrem,often called ‘Ephrem Syrus,’ is the most widely famous of Syriac writers. His earlier life was spent at Nisibis, but after that town was abandoned to the Persians by Jovian in 363 he migrated to Edessa, and died there in 373. Vast quantities of extant literature are ascribed to him, and though much is spurious the genuine remainder is very voluminous Much of it is ‘poetry,’ i.e. works written in lines of so many syllables. Syriac poetry is even easier to write than ‘blank verse’ in English, for only the number of syllables need be counted; there is no accent, no quantity, no rhyme. And as Ephraim is extraordinarily prolix, and as when the thought is unravelled it is mostly commonplace, his poems make very heavy reading for us moderns. His prose is better, and in the treatises edited from a very illegible palimpsest from the Nitrian collection in Egypt he shows real critical insight. At least, his theory that the Manichaean system is best explained as an adaptation of those of Bardaisan and of Marcion has much to recommend it. It is a pity that Ephraim’s Commentary on the Diatessaron is extant only in an Armenian translation.

Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411, made it one of his first cares to undertake an authoritative revision of the New Testament in Syriac from the Greek, ‘because of its variations exactly as it w This survives in many manuscripts, some of them as old as the fifth century, and is known as the Peshitta, i.e. the simple (version), so called to distinguish it from later learned translations which were embellished with critical marks. The Peshitta is used in the services of all existing sects of the Syriac-speaking Church, and the manuscripts all agree most wonderfully in text, so that there are hardly any variations. The New Testament books include the Four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline Epistles (including Hebrews), with James, 1 Peter and 1 John. The four minor General Epistles and the Apocalypse are not included. So far as we know, this was the first time any of the General Epistles had been translated into Syriac. Neither in Aphraates nor in the genuine works of Ephraim is there a single clear reference to any of the General Epistles, and the Doctrine of Addai says ‘ The Law and the Prophets and the Gospel.. .and the Epistles of Paul... and the Acts...: these books read ye in the Church of God and with these read not others.’

We need not ascribe to Rabbula an anachronistic interest in textual criticism. What he was interested in was to assimilate his Church to that of the Empire by substituting the ‘Separate’ Four Gospels for the Diatessaron. The Four were called in Syriac the Separated Gospel  as distinguished from the Diatessaron which was also called the ‘Mixed’ Gospel. He was eminently successful; so much so, that no copy of the Diatessaron in Syriac is extant. But two copies of the pre-Rabbulan Syriac text of the ‘ Separate’ Four Gospels have survived, known as the Sinai Palimpsest (Syr. £) and the Curetonian MS. in the British Museum (Syr. C). Both are extremely ancient: Syr. £ belongs almost certainly to the fourth century, and Syr. C can be very little later. Of C a little less than half is preserved; S has lost only 17 leaves out of 159, but it is a palimpsest and some words and lines are here and there illegible.

S and C differ in text from each other as well as from the Peshitta, but they more often agree in characteristic readings, so that it is possible to gain a fair idea of their original. We may reasonably connect this with the tradition of the ordination of Palut by Serapion of Antioch, i.e. a little before a.d. 200. The Diatessaron was a whole generation earlier, and till the time of Rabbula (411—435) separate Four never were much used in the Syriac-speaking Church. There are no marks of liturgical use either in S or in (7, and their text has many harmonistic readings, which doubtless show the influence of the then better known text of Tatian’s Harmony. Apart from this, this Old Syriac version (so called to distinguish it from Rabbula’s revision) is a very valuable textual witness, having curious and still unexplained affinities with the text of Alexandria (generally considered by modern critical scholars to be the purest), with the Old Latin texts, and also with the texts now associated with Caesarea.

No manuscript of the Old Syriac except the Gospels has survived, but Commentaries or paraphrases of Ephraim on the Pauline Epistles and the Acts are extant in Armenian translations, which give some idea of what the text must have been. Hebrews is there received but not Philemon, the number of Pauline letters being kept up by an apocryphal Third Epistle to the Corinthians, actually quoted in the ancient (but spurious) Acts of Sharbil.

 

III.

MANI AND THE MANICHEES

 

The end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century saw not only the great and open struggle between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire, it saw also the beginning of the struggle between the Church and the strangest of all Christian heresies. The fight went on all through the fourth century, and it was not till the middle of the following century that Manichaeism, called by one of its earliest opponents, Alexander of Lycopolis in Egypt, ‘the New Christianity,’ was definitely worsted. For nine years, from 373—382, Augustine was a Manichee, and that period may be regarded as the high-water mark of the Manichaean religion in the Roman Empire. In the East it survived for a long time, and did not finally disappear till the age of Zenghis Khan.

It was on Sunday, 20 March a.d. 242 that the preaching of Manichaeism first began. On that day a young man called Mani began to announce at Seleuceia-Ctesiphon the capital of the new Empire of the Sassanians, and under the patronage of the king Shapur I, the new religion of which he was the prophet. Mani was executed by the order of another Sassanian monarch a little more than thirty years later, but by the time of his death his religion had taken root all over the East, and in the succeeding century it had spread throughout the Roman Empire.

A few years ago our knowledge of Manichaeism was very scanty. Besides the writings of Augustine in Latin and other controversial writings in Greek we had an elaborate account of it in Arabic. In 1912 and 1921 were published C. W. Mitchell’s Refutations of Ephraim: Ephraim died only a hundred years after Mani and wrote in Syriac, the language in which Mani composed most of his works. More sensational than Mr Mitchell’s decipherments have been the discoveries of Manichaean documents in Central Asia. Three or four scientific expeditions made in the early years of this century to Chinese Turkestan, north of Tibet, in the now desolate region north and south of Lop-Nor, brought to light thousands of written fragments, some hundreds of which were from Manichaean manuscripts. Unfortunately they are all fragments, bits of torn books and rolls, but they are at least the writings of Manichees, not mere refuta­tions. Some are in a sort of Persian, more are in a Turkish dialect, and it should be added that from the same region comes an account of the Manichaean religion written in Chinese. As recently as 1931 the yet more surprising discovery of a small Manichaean Library has been made in Egypt, from near Lycopolis, consisting of about half-a-dozen volumes in Coptic, containing hymns, letters, some historical accounts of the tragic deaths of Mani and his successor Sisinnius, and a lengthy work called the Chapters or First Principles. Unfortunately the volumes are badly preserved: the papyrus leaves are stuck together, and the process of restoration, which is necessarily slow, has to precede decipherment and publication.

All our documents, however, tell very much the same story, they all give very much the same picture of the religion of the Manichees. We begin, as the Manichees themselves did, by the Two Principles and the Three Moments. The Two Principles, or Roots, are the Light and the Dark. The contrast between the Light and the Dark is the fundamental distinction for Manichee thought, more fundamental than that between Good and Bad, or God and Man. The Three Moments are the Past, the Present, and the Future. Light and Dark are two absolutely different eternal Existences. In the beginning they were separate, as they should be. But in the Past the Dark made an incursion on the Light and some of the Light became mingled with the Dark, as it is still in the Present, in this world around us; nevertheless a means of refining this Light from the Dark has been called into being, and of protecting the whole realm of Light from any further invasion, so that in the Future Light and Dark will be happily separated.

Light and Dark are the proper designations of the two Principles, but to Mani with the idea of Light was conjoined everything that was orderly, peaceful, intelligent, clear, while with that of Dark was conjoined everything that was anarchic, turbulent, material, muddy. The usual Manichaean presentation of the primordial condition of Light and Dark is that of two contiguous realms or states, existing side by side from all eternity without any commixture. Opposite the realm of the Light, in which dwelt the Father of Greatness, was the realm of the Dark, a region of suffocating smoke, of destructive fire, of scorching wind, of poisonous water, in a word, of ‘darkness that might be felt’; for the Dark to Mani, as to Bardaisan, was not ‘privation mere of light and absent day,’ but a substantial entity. The denizens of this pestiferous realm suited its character: Mani represents them as groping about in aimless anarchy. They and their abode were pictured as in every way odious: the horrible Dark is peopled with a horrible race appropriate in character and habits to the place they live in. But in all this there is nothing evil. Evil began when the Dark invaded the Light.

Mani could not explain how this first disturbance of the eternal order took place, any more than Bardaisan could. He seems to have said that somehow the Dark smelt and perceived that there was ‘something pleasant’ beyond his region. It cannot well be doubted that Mani’s point is that the beginning of evil is unregulated desire. But we must not regard Mani’s cosmogony as a mere allegory: fantastic as his Gods and Angels may be, it is clear that he and his disciples did regard them as real. The modern investigator has to be clear on both sides: to be fair to the religion of the Manichees we need to remember that the fantastic myths which Mani taught correspond to a serious view of the strange mixture of good and bad which we feel within ourselves and see in other human beings; and on the other hand as historians we must not treat as allegories the tales of the Primal Man and the rest of the Manichaean mythology because to us, with our modern con­ceptions of the material universe, the tales sound silly and bizarre.

The tale of the Primal Man is fundamental to Manichaeism. He was called into being to repel the invasion of the Light by the Dark, and was clothed or armed with the Five bright Elements, with Light, Wind, Fire, Water and Air (as distinct from ‘Wind’). But the result was disaster. The Primal Man was left lying unconscious on the field, and the Five Elements were swallowed up by the Dark. This combat corresponds to the Fall in Catholic doctrine, but, as has been said above (p. 497), it is still nearer to the doctrine of Bardaisan, in that it makes the Fall to be the immediate cause of the world in which we live.

The Primal Man recovered from his swoon and entreated the Father of Greatness for help, so a fresh evocation of Light powers came into being. One of these, the Friend of the Light, called to the Primal Man, and the Primal Man had power to answer him. The Powers of Darkness were definitely mastered and their invasion of the Light was arrested. But victory is one thing and reparations another. The dark Archons had absorbed, almost digested, the Five Bright elements, and the Realm of Light would be for ever poorer if these were not recovered. The problem was not only to turn the proper region of Darkness into a prison by encircling it with an impenetrable wall, but also to extract the absorbed Light from the Archons. According to Mani our world is the result of that process.

First of all, a great deal of the Light-substance was immediately disgorged, and out of this the two pure Luminaries, Sun and Moon, were made. But a great deal remained in the very frames of the Archons, so the Primal Man ‘flayed them, and made this sky from their skins, and out of their excrement he compacted the earth, and out of their bones he moulded and piled up the mountains,’ so that ‘in rain and dew the pure Elements yet re­maining in them might be squeezed out.’ Thus to Mani our earth with the visible heavens above us is formed of the dismembered parts of the evil demons of Darkness. It is held together and guarded by five Beings, especially evoked for the purpose by the Light: these are the Slenditenens, who holds the world suspended like a chandelier; the ‘King of Honour,’ whose rays collect the fragments of emitted light; the ‘Adamas,’ with shield and spear driving off any rescue-party of the demons of the Dark; the ‘King of Glory,’ who rotates the heavenly spheres that surround the world; and the gigantic ‘Atlas,’ on whose shoulders the whole mass is supported.

Meanwhile the Archons, though fettered and dismembered, produced not only plants and animals but also a being made in the image of the Divine Messenger of the Light that had appeared to them. This was Adam, truly a microcosm, the image of the world, of God and matter, of Light and Dark. To him, as he lay inert on the ground, appeared Jesus the Zdiwana-—exactly what this epithet means is doubtful, but in any case it denotes a heavenly Being— who roused him from his slumber and made him realise his true nature. ‘Jesus,’ says Mani, ‘made him stand upright and taste of the Tree of Life.. .when he said “Woe, woe, to the creator of my body! Woe to him who has bound my soul to it and to the rebels who enslaved me!’” As Cumont remarks, by making Adam taste of the tree of knowledge Jesus, and not the Tempter, revealed to him the extent of his misery. But man will know henceforth the way of enfranchisement. By continence and re­nunciation he must set free little by little the Divine Substance within him, thereby joining in the great work of distillation with which God is occupied in the universe. If only Adam had persevered all would have been well, according to the Manichees, but he forgot and knew Eve, an inferior being, formed by the Archons to entice him. So Seth was born, and in him and us, his descendants, the particles of the Light are still imprisoned.

This is the Manichaean teaching about the Past. In the Present the Powers of Light have sent Prophets—Mani names Buddha and Zoroaster—but till Mani himself appeared the only one that mattered was, to use Mani’s own phrase, ‘Jesus who appeared in Judaea.’

Jesus in Mani’s system occupies a peculiar position, which sug­gests that Manichaeism must be classed as an aberrant form of Christianity rather than as an independent religion. He was the last of the Prophets before Mani, and Mani regarded himself as the apostle of Jesus, beginning all his letters with ‘Mani, apostle of Jesus Christ.’ So Augustine had told us, and it is now confirmed by a fragment from Turfan and from the finds in Egypt. The ‘Jesus’ revered by Mani has, it is true, a different nature from the Jesus Christ of orthodox theology, and also from the Jesus of the Four Gospels. But Mani does mean the same ‘Jesus who appeared in Judaea,’ and his followers, as the books of Manichaean hymns testify, revered him along with Mani himself. It was Jesus who, when sent on his message of salvation, had contrived the vast mechanism, which takes up the souls of men and the light-particles of their bodies to the Moon when they die, which thus waxes for fifteen days, and when the souls have been purged (by the Sun, apparently) they are emptied out from the Moon, which then wanes for fifteen days. The souls are gathered into the ‘Column of Glory,’ no doubt meaning the Milky Way, till at last the ‘Perfect Man’ is reconstructed.

In accordance with the Gospel human history will end with the second coming of Jesus, who will judge all men by their treatment of the Faithful—i.e. the Manichaean Elect. This piece of the early Christian Hope was attested by a fragment found at Turfan, and now it is found to be the very core of the first of the ‘Homilies’ in Coptic (called The Discourse of the Great War\published in 1934.

Thus according to Manichaean belief the particles of the Light, still enmeshed in this dirty world, are being gradually distilled out of it. In the end nothing will be left but what is, literally, dust and ashes. Even this will be consumed in a great bonfire which is to last 1468 years, after which it will sink down into the Dark by its own weight, while all the heavenly material will have been refined out of it and taken to the realm of Light where it belongs. The Smudge—i.e. this world, in the Manichaean view—will have been completely erased. That is their hope for the Future. It is a striking instance of the definiteness of Manichaean doctrine, that this curious period for the duration of the Great Fire, viz. 1468 years, the origin of which has not been explained, has been found in the Turfan documents, though otherwise it was only known from the Arabic Fihris.

The ro1e of Jesus in Manichaeism deserves a paragraph. Before the discoveries at Turfan the general tendency had been to emphasize the Oriental element in Mani’s system and to regard the Christian element, then known most from Augustine, as due mainly to the adoption of a Christian dress by Manichaeism in the West. The new discoveries have changed all that: they prove that the Christian element, though heretical, is fundamental to Manichaeism, and that Mani, who came from the land of Babylon and had travelled to India, drew most of his inspiration from the Christianity of Marcion and of Bardaisan.

A first difficulty in comparing Christianity with the Manichee Religion lies in a difference between their fundamental conceptions. Orthodox Christianity more or less starts with the religion of Judaism, the religion of the Old Testament. The primal antithesis is between ‘God’ and ‘His Creatures,’ of which the race of Men is the noblest species. The main question in Western Christology was whether, and to what extent, ‘Jesus who appeared in Judaea’ was to be reckoned as belonging to ‘God’ or to ‘the Creatures.’ But to Mani the ultimate antithesis was not between God and Man, but between Light and Dark. A Man was not a unit, but a particle of Light enclosed in an alien and irredeemable envelope: there is no hope for a Man as such. The hope is that his Light-particles, not his whole personality, may escape at death from the dark prison-house of the body. And ‘God’ also belongs to a conception quite different from the personal, transcendent, Yahweh of the Old Testament. As used by the Manichees ‘God’ seems to be a name for anything wholly composed of and belonging to the Light-substance. The ‘Primal Man,’ the ‘Messenger,’ and others of the heavenly hierarchy, are little more than manifestations of the energy of the Light. They are not even, properly speaking, eternal, for they seem to come into existence to meet a need, as occasion arises.

With this view of God and Man, it is no wonder that Mani thought of Jesus as human only in appearance. But Jesus occupies a peculiar position also in the hierarchy of Light. Full as our accounts are of the Manichee cosmogony, no tale of theirs purports to give the story of how he was ‘evoked’ or called into being. Alone among the heavenly denizens He has a personal name, is in fact a person, as Buddha is, or Hermes, or Mani himself. No doubt this is because Jesus, whatever Mani may have thought about Him, is ultimately a certain Person ‘who appeared in Judaea’ a little more than two hundred years before Mani began to preach.

It has been indicated above that many of the outstanding principles of Manichaeism are far more natural results of tendencies in the Christianity of the third century and of Mesopotamia than of its modern development. The Manichaean idea of this world as the result of an original catastrophe, so that ‘the Fall’ comes before ‘this world’ exists and is indeed the cause of its existence, is derived from Bardaisan, the Aramaean Christian philosopher of Edessa. The Manichaean view of Jesus is doubtless akin to that of Marcion. The Manichaean church, which they themselves called Ecclesia,Tms also organized like the Marcionites: as was also that of the early Syriac church of the Euphrates Valley, otherwise orthodox. Moreover the tendency towards Asceticism, as re­marked above, was characteristic even of the Great Church within the Roman Empire.

The Manichees were divided into two main classes, the Elect and the Hearers. The ‘Elect’ alone was the true Manichee, the ‘Hearer’ was no more than an adherent, but the renunciations exacted of the Elect were severe and their numbers were com­paratively small. All Manichees were vegetarians, but the Elect abstained from wine, from marriage, and from property. They were supposed to live a wandering life, possessing no more than food for a day and clothes for a year. Their obligation not to produce fresh life or to take it was so absolute that they might neither sow nor reap, nor even break their bread themselves, ‘lest they pain the Light which was mixed with it.’ So they went about, as Indian holy men do, with a disciple who prepared their food for them. ‘And when they wish to eat bread,’ we read in the Acta Archelai, ‘they pray first, speaking thus to the bread “I neither reaped nor winnowed nor ground thee, nor set thee in an oven; it was another did this, and brought to me: I eat thee innocently.” And when he has said this for himself, he says to the disciple “I have prayed for thee.’” On the other hand, it was one of the first duties of the mere Hearers to provide food for the Elect, so that in a country where there were any Manichees the Elect were sure not to starve. Women as well as men entered the ranks of the Elect.

There is a difference between the inner attitude of the Manichee ascetic and the orthodox Christian monk. The latter, whether hermit or coenobite, had retired from the world with a consciousness of sin and a sense of personal unworthiness. It is not for nothing that ‘mourner’ is one of the Syriac technical terms for a Christian monk. The Manichee Elect does not appear to have been a ‘mourner.’ He was indeed fenced about with tabus, but by virtue of his profession he was already Righteous: he was called Zaddika ‘the righteous’ (in Arabic Zindir), by his coreligionists. And though he was forbidden to prepare his food himself, yet a sacramental, even physical, benefit accrued to the Universe through his eating it. This came to pass through the particles of Light contained in the food passing into his own pure body, which at his death would be conveyed somehow into the realms of Light. Exactly how this was effected our documents do not tell us: it may be doubted it Mani himself had a consistent theory about it.

The religious duties of the Hearers can best be inferred from the Khuastuantft, i.e. ‘Confession,’ a document which has been recovered almost entire from the finds in Chinese Turkestan. It is written in Turkestan Turkish, and contains a preamble fol­lowed by confession of fifteen kinds of sins, each section ending with the Persian (not Turkish) formula Mandstar hirza, which means ‘O cleanse our spots!’

The Ihuastuanift is more than a mere confession. Each section begins by formulating the true Manichee doctrine, and then goes on to say ‘ If we have neglected or denied this, we are sinful and must cry Mandstar hirza. It is thus a profession of faith also, the most instructive document we possess for studying Manichaean religion as a working system. But it must be borne in mind how ambiguous a term is ‘ God ’ when used by Manichees, for to them ‘God’ is rather a substance than a person. Tangri, lit. ‘God,’ is rather to be rendered ‘divine’ than ‘God,’ for the Supreme Being when thought of as personal is called Azrua, i.e. the Persian Zrvan, which practically corresponds to our use of ‘the Eternal.’ The Primal Man is here called Khormuzta, i.e. ‘Ormuzd.’ This does not imply an adaptation of Persian or Magian myth: it is merely the name used of the Manichaean figure, just as if one were to call the President of a non-Christian religion its Pope.

Further, we have to bear in mind the fourfold nature of God according to Manichee theology. ‘Mani enjoined belief,’ says the FihriA, ‘in four great things—God, His Light, His Power, His Wisdom. And God is the King of the Paradise of Light, His Light is the Sun and Moon, His Power is the Five Angels, viz. the Air, the Wind,theLight, the WaterandtheFire, and His Wisdom is the Holy Religion’, which last in the Khuastuanift is identified sometimes with the Prophets who announced it, sometimes with the ordinances themselves. This fourfold conception of the Divine determines a good deal of the structure of the document.

The Prologue sets forth that as the Divine Khormuzta with the Divine Five Elements came down to fight against the Demons of the Dark, but was overcome and temporarily lost his Divine Light, so we, the penitent Manichees, if we have erred and lost touch with Azrua the pure bright God and become mixed with the Dark, may nevertheless hope to be restored, even as the Primal Man was.

After treating of blasphemy against God, against Sun and Moon, against the Five Divine Elements, and against social offences and false religion, it deals with offences after entering true religion, the preamble to which forms a sort of Manichaean Credo. ‘Since coming to know the True God and the Pure Law, we have learnt the law of the Two Roots and the Three Moments, that the Light-root is God-land, the Dark-root is Hell-land; yea, we learned what had been before land and sky existed, why God and Demon had battled against each other, how Light and Dark had intermingled, and who had created land and sky; yea, we learned in what way this land and sky will be annihilated, and how Light and Dark will be separated, and what will happen afterwards : to the divine Azrua, the divine Sun and Moon, the divine Power, and the Prophets, we turned, we trusted, we became Hearers. Four bright seals on our hearts have we sealed, (1) To Love, the seal of the divine Azrua, (2) To Believe, the seal of the divine Sun and Moon, (3) To Fear, the seal of the Five divine elements, (4) Wise Wisdom, the seal of the Prophets.’ This Manichaean Credo is permeated by the four-fold conception of God’s nature, which has been mentioned above. The section then goes on to say that if the penitents should have violated their faith, then—Manastar htrza.

The remaining six sections refer to various offences in fasting, almsgiving and other religious duties. It ends saying ‘ every day, every month, trespass, sin do we commit! To the Light-Gods, to the Law’s Majesty, to the pure Elect Ones, from trespass, from sin escaping, we pray Manastar htrza!

There is a real difference between Christian and Manichee ethics. It can be expressed in a single sentence: Christianity is concerned with persons, Manichaeism with things. Christian sympathy goes out to men and women, who even in a fallen state are regarded as the image of God, and for whom Christ has died. The sympathy of the Manichee was directed, not towards men, but towards the Light imprisoned in men. Men were, to some extent and at second hand, in the image of God, but they were only a sort of pirated copy, made by the evil dark-Archons to imitate the Messenger of the Light who had appeared to them.

The third of the four Homilies (published in 1934) is of historical interest. It gives an account of the ‘crucifixion’ (i.e. the martyrdom) of Mani by Vahram I (Varanes, Bahram), grandson of Shapur, Mani’s patron. It mentions one Innaeus, chief of the Manichees after Mani’s successor Sisinnius, who pleased Vahram II and secured for the Manichees some peace from persecution. There seems to be another part of this work at Berlin, so that we may hope in future to be able to know some­thing of the course of Manichee history before Islam overwhelmed Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism alike.

Meanwhile perhaps the most instructive product of the wonderful recovery of specimens of Manichaean literature during the present century are the many examples of Manichee hymns, which, like Christian hymns, more accurately depict the hopes and aspirations of those who used them than books of formal instruction or controversy. No doubt the Manichaeans’ ethic is ascetic, ‘a fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ but their hymns prove that their religion inspired in them genuine emotion, full of loyalty to Mani and to Jesus. ‘Amen, to thee, first born Apostle, Divine Lord Mani our Saviour!’ Or again: ‘Thou art God and Full Moon, Jesus Lord, Full Moon of waxing glory!.. Mani, new Full Moon!... Holy one, Jesu, cleanse my stains! Divine Lord Mani, deliver my soul!’ Or again: ‘O Jesu, Virgin of Light! O Lord Mani! Do Thou make peace within me! O Light-bringer, deliver my soul out of this born-dead life, deliver my soul out of this born-dead life!’ We may quarrel with the form of expression, both from the literary and the theological point of view, but it is clear that the Manichees who composed these pathetic ejaculations must have been moved by genuine religious sentiment.

Such were the main characteristics of the religion, which challenged official Christianity all through the century in which the Orthodox and Arians were struggling for mastery. It failed in the end, but the fear and alarm the Manichaean propaganda excited was real: it can best be felt by us in reading the story of Porphyry of Gaza and his encounter with Julia, the Manichaean missionary. It was a serious conflict. The religion of Mani, when we look below the fantastic mythology with which he clothed his ideas, is a serious attempt to explain the presence of evil in the world we live in, and it does combine immediate pessimism with ultimate optimism—perhaps the most favourable atmosphere for the religious sentiment. It is true that the Manichees thought of our world as the result of an accident, and that no true improvement is possible till it is altogether abolished. This world, they thought, is bad to begin with, and it will go from bad to worse. But they believed that Light is really greater and stronger than the Dark, that in the end all that was good in their being would be collected in the domain of Light, a realm altogether swayed by Intelligence, Reason, Mind, good Imagination, and good Intention. Though at the same time there would always exist another region, dark, and dominated by unregulated desire, it would only be peopled by beings for whom such a region was appropriate, and that they would be separated off for ever from invading the region of Light and so producing another Smudge, such as our world essentially is, according to the Manichaean view.