Read Ebook: A Short History of Christianity Second Edition Revised With Additions by Robertson J M John Mackinnon

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 483 lines and 99658 words, and 10 pages

he doctrine of forgiveness; but at least let it be noted that the doctrine had been framed by his race.

CONDITIONS OF SURVIVAL

? 1. Popular Appeal

Overshadowed among the Jews by the common traditions of Judaism, and faced among the Gentiles by such competition as we have seen, the Christian cult had to acquire all the chief attractions of popular pagan religion if it was to outdo its rivals. Such success could never have been reached through mere superiority of ethical ideal, even had such superiority been present: by the admission even of Christian advocates, there were high moral ideals in most of the pagan ethical systems current among the educated class; but those systems never became popular, not seeking to be so. To gain the mass, the new propagandists found, the tastes of the mass had to be propitiated; and at best the more conscientious of them could but hope to control the ignorance and the superstition they sought to attract. When in the second and third centuries the more rigid Puritans, such as the Montanists, formed themselves into special communities, they were inevitably repudiated by the main body, which had to temper its doctrine to the characters of the average laity and the average clergy. Thus the development of primitive Christianity was necessarily such an assimilation of neighbouring lore and practice as we have already in part traced. The story of the Christ had to take on all the lasting dramatic features of the prehistoric worships; and the mysteries had as far as possible to embody those details in the dramatic pagan fashion. Where dramatization was going on, new details would naturally be added, all tending to the same end; and on the basis of these early dramatic inventions would arise many of the gospel narratives. This, however, must have been a matter of time.

In the earlier stages of propaganda the appeal was primarily to Jews, and secondarily to Jew proselytes; but after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem it must have been made in an increasing degree to Gentiles, chiefly of the poorer classes, whether artisans or traders. As among the pagan religious societies before mentioned, slaves were admitted; such being not seldom in as good a position as artisans. There is also evidence that, on the avowed theological principles of the sect, men even of bad repute were received, of course on condition of repentance. "Let him that stole, steal no more," is one of the injunctions in one of the later epistles. In the nature of the case such adherents could not be multiplied, in the teeth of the attractions of the other cults, without a continual offer of congenial entertainment; and the weekly "love-feast," on the "day of the Lord," would be the first mainstay. The constant warnings and admonitions in the epistles exclude the notion that these assemblies escaped the usual risks of disorder; and the standing problem of the supervisors was to maintain the social attraction without tolerating open licence. Insofar as they succeeded, for a time, it was by appeal to ideals of abstinence which, as we have seen, had long been current in the East.

? 2. Economic Causation

The play of economic interest in the establishment and maintenance of religions is one of the constant forces in their history. In the simplest forms of savage life the medicine-man or priest makes a superior living out of his function; and every powerful cult in antiquity enriched its priests. The developed worships of Assyria and Babylon, Phoenicia and Egypt, were carried on by great priestly corporations, with enormous revenues; those of the Egyptian priesthood in particular being reckoned even in the Roman period at a third of the wealth of the nation. Early Greece and Rome, in comparison, showed little ecclesiastical development by reason mainly of the fact that their relative political freedom offered so many other channels to acquisitive energy. In republican Rome priesthood was a caste-privilege enjoyed by a select few, the majority of the ruling class being content to have it so; and there and in Greece alike the normal conception of deities as local, with local worships, precluded even the thought of a universal priesthood, though the Roman policy gave all the Gods of the extending State a place in the common pantheon. In old Greece it came about that the fixed ideal of the City-State, and the very multiplicity of cults even in the separate states, kept all the worships isolated; while the republican habit kept the priests and priestesses members of the body politic, and not associations apart. The Christian church began its historic growth on this ground, in the period of imperialism and decadence, with the eastern examples before it, the Jewish system of church-finance and propaganda to proceed upon, the Greek democratic practice to facilitate its first steps, and the Roman sway to allow of its spread and official organization. Lastly came the usage, imitated from the later political and religious life of the Greeks, of Church Synods, in which disruptive doctrinal tendencies were more or less controlled by the principle of the majority vote, and the weaker groups were assisted and encouraged by the others. In every aspect the evolution was by way of adaptation on tried lines.

As we have seen, Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman period was financed through a system of travelling "apostles" and collectors, who followed up the dispersed Jewish race wherever it flourished, and got together great revenues for the temple service and the priestly and rabbinical class. Jesuism began on those lines, and so set up habits of intercommunication between its groups, which for their own part were locally and independently financed by their members in the Greek and Jewish fashion. Whatever may have been the practice of enthusiasts such as Paul would appear to have been, the principle that "the labourer is worthy of his hire" must have become general; and insofar as special preaching was a requisite and an attraction for the members, the travelling preachers would have to be fee'd or salaried. One of the later epistles makes mention of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, as different types; also of elders , deacons, and bishops ; and as the groups increased and began to possess buildings, the creation of professional opportunities set up a new economic interest in propaganda.

In neither Greek nor Roman life was the phenomenon new. Centuries before the Christian era, the influx of the Dionysian and other mystic cults in Greece had been followed by the rise of swarms of religious mendicants, many of whom carried with them sacred books and ministered consolation while playing on credulity; and on a higher plane the educated "sophists" or humanists of the pre-Macedonian period had made a livelihood by moral and philosophical teaching or lecturing. Later, the Stoics and other philosophers became a species of religious directors or "spiritual advisers" as well as ethical lecturers; and in Rome especially this calling had practically the status of a profession. Thus had arisen a specific means of livelihood for educated men without official posts or inherited incomes. But any religious cult which should set up an organization would have as against such teachers an obvious financial advantage, in respect of its power of attracting numbers, its local permanence, and its means of collecting revenue; and even men incapable of success as lecturers could attain relatively secure positions as presbyters or "bishops"--that is, overseers, first of single churches, and later of district groups. The original function of the bishop was that later assigned to "elders" in the presbyterian system--the supervision of the public offerings or "collections" and their distribution among needy brethren. Later, the bishop became the religious head of the group, and its representative in communication with others. Not till such organization was reached could the new sect count on permanence.

An important source of income from an early stage was the munificence of the richer women converts; and insofar as the Christist movement stood for a restraint on sexual licence it doubtless gained from the moral bias as well as from the superstition of women of the upper and middle classes throughout the empire. The richer women were indeed made to feel that it was their duty to make "oblations" in proportion to their means. On the other hand, then as now, the giving of alms to the poor was a means of enlisting the sympathetic support of serious women; and the Christists here had a lead not only from oriental example in general and that of later Judaism in particular, but from the policy of food-doles now systematically pursued in the Roman empire. The later epistles show that much was made of the good offices of "widows," who, themselves poor and wholly or partly supported by the congregations, would serve as comforters of suffering or bereaved members, and ministrants to the sick. The death-rate was doubtless high in the eastern cities, then as now. In this way were attracted to the church large masses of the outside poor who were not similarly considered or sought for by any of the competing pagan cults. But it was necessary to compete in other ways with the mass of itinerant diviners and religious mendicants, who had much the same kind of vogue as the begging friars of later Christendom; and exorcists were at an early date a recognized class of officers in connection with the Christian churches.

At what stage revenue began to be derived from the usage of praying for the souls of the dead it is impossible to say; but as early as the third century it is found to be customary to recite before the altar the names of givers of oblations, who were then publicly prayed for. In various other ways the church was able to elicit gifts. It lies on the face of all the canonical books that a prediction of the speedy end of the world was one of the constant doctrines of the early church; and such a belief would naturally elicit donations in the first century as it did in the tenth. Obviously, too, the gradual development of the "mysteries" would strengthen the hands of the priestly class. In particular, as it was early made compulsory on all baptized persons, except penitents, to take the sacrament, the privilege of administering or withholding the eucharist was a sure source of revenue, as was the power of initiation into the mysteries of the other cults for their ministrants.

? 3. Organization and Sacred Books

It was finally to the joined influences of ecclesiastical organization and of popular sacred books that Christism owed its measure of success as against the freely-competing pagan cults; and on both sides its primary advantage, as we have seen, came from its Judaic basis. For nearly two centuries the Hebrew Bible, made widely accessible in the Septuagint version, was its literary mainstay, by reason of the prestige attaching to such a mass of ancient religious literature in the Greco-Roman world; and whereas other cults also had their special lore, the Christist movement was specially buttressed by its system of ecclesiastical union, also imitated from the Judaic. The ecclesiastical system, above all, was a means to the development of the new sacred books which completed the definition of Christianity as something apart from Judaism; and these in turn made a permanent foundation for the historic church. A glance at the cult associated with the name of the pagan Apollonius of Tyana, who won fame in the first century, makes it clear that even where a great renown attached to a travelling religious reformer and reputed wonder-worker, and where an adoring biography served in some degree to prolong his fame, the lack of a hierarchy or connected series of religious groups prevented on the one hand its continuance, and on the other hand the necessary development of the literature which should conserve it.

The first traceable literature special to the Christians, as we have seen, consisted in "apostolic" and sub-apostolic epistles of exhortation, which were read aloud in the churches after the Jewish manner. Priestly needs conserved such documents, and further evoked forgeries, aimed against new heresies and schisms. But the mass of men are always more easily to be attracted by narrative than by homilies; and the mystery-play, by means of which alone could the church at the outset compete with the pagan cults similarly provided, lent itself to a written as well as to an acted history.

Such a document as the gospel story of the Supper and its sequel is in itself the proof of the priority of the mystery-play, in some simple form, to the gospel story. In its present degree of detail the play must belong to a stage of the movement at which it had made some Gentile headway; and its reduction to writing for reading may be supposed to have taken place either at a time when the Christians by reason of persecution were prevented from carrying on their usual rituals or festivals, or, more probably, when the hierarchy decided for prudential or disciplinary reasons to abandon the regular resort to dramatic spectacle. It does not follow, of course, that none of the didactic parts of the gospel was in writing before the play was transcribed; but the fact that none of the Pauline epistles quotes any of the Jesuine teachings, and that the first Clementine epistle alludes to but one or two, is a reason for holding that they came very slowly into existence. The dramatic development would naturally occur for the most part or wholly in Gentile hands. It is not certain, indeed, that the later Jews remained uniformly averse to drama, which was partly forced on them by the Herods; and the theory of a dramatic origin for the Apocalypse is not quite untenable; but it happens that the most obviously dramatic parts of the gospel story are those which, on Gentile lines, throw the guilt of the crucifixion on the Jews.

When once a gospel existed, interpolation and alteration were for some generations easy; and what happened was a multiplication of doctrines and documents at the hands of different groups or sects or leaders, the men with dogmatic or moral ideas taking this means to establish them, without regard to the coherence or consistency of the texts. Many passages are visibly inserted in order to countervail others, it being easier to add than to suppress. Only late in the second century can a canon have begun to be formed, as the Clementine epistles quote a now lost document in the nature of a gospel, and Justin's "Memoirs of the Apostles" diverge from those preserved. The later rejection by the Church of such documents proves them to have been regarded as in part heretical; and parts of the canonical gospels were altered for various dogmatic reasons after they had been made to include much of the matter in the uncanonical. The third gospel avows that "many" previous narratives existed; and apart from all these there have been preserved a number of rejected gospels, which run mainly to miraculous stories. Some of these were long abundantly popular, that of "Nicodemus" having had common vogue down to the Middle Ages. But the more thoughtful clergy would soon recognize the greater value of documents which by their teaching could impress the more educated of the laity; and the double influence of the supernaturalism and the moral appeal went to create cohesion throughout the movement.

The organization, in turn, operated as a check on the spread of heresies, which, after carrying it further afield, soon threatened to dissolve the cult into an infinity of mutually repellent groups. Insofar, indeed, as these appealed to the more speculative and quasi-philosophic minds, they were foredoomed to decay with the decay of culture, and to be at best the creed of the few. Those, in particular, who carried anti-Semitism to the point of discrediting the Jewish Deity, lost the support of the Jewish sacred books, of which the mere literary mass and variety constituted in such an age a solid basis for a cultus. Yet even on those lines the Manichaean cult spread far and lived long, so easy was it then for any cult to rise. Survival lay with simple concrete myth of the popular sort, concrete ritual, and explicit dogma backed by the force of the State; and the needs of popular faith kept ever to the front the human aspect of the crucified God, even when he was being dogmatically declared to be at once distinct from and one with his co-eternal Father. This indeed was but one of the many irreducible contradictions imbedded in the sacred books. To bring these to consistency was impossible; but the hierarchy could set up formal creeds over and above them; and it mattered little to the official and financial continuity of the Church that these creeds were themselves chronically altered. What was necessary to success was simply some common standard and common action.

? 4. Concession and Fixation

It is not to be supposed that any abnormal sagacity presided over the formation of either the creed and canon or the official system of the Church; but insofar as it survived it can be seen to have done so in virtue alike of assimilation and of refusal to assimilate. Much expansion was needed to make an area broad enough for the pagan populace; and on the side of custom and myth hardly any pagan element was ultimately refused. At the outset the great cause of strife between Christian and pagan was the contemptuous refusal of the former to show any respect for "idols"--a principle derived by Jewry from Persia, and passed on to the first Jesuists. When, however, the Christian cult became that of the State, it of necessity reverted, as we shall see, to the psychology of the multitude, and carried the use of images as far as pagans had ever done. Even the so-called "animal-worship" of the Egyptians partly survived in such usages as the presence of the sacred ox and ass in the mystery-play of the Nativity , in the adoption of the "four zoa" of the Apocalypse as the symbols of the four evangelists, and in the conception of "the Lamb." Before the period of image-worship, too, the Church had fully accepted the compromise by which countless pagan "heroes" and "geniuses," the subjects of local cults, became enrolled as saints and martyrs, whose bones had given to tombs and wells and shrines a sacred virtue, and whose old festival-days became part of the new ecclesiastical calendar.

Above all, there was finally forced on the Church a cult of the Mother as Virgin Goddess, without which it could not have held its own against the great and well-managed worships of Isis and Rhea-Cybel? and D?m?t?r; since the first and last in particular aroused in multitudes a rapture of exalted devotion such as was not psychologically possible towards even a crucified God, save insofar as the emotion of women worshippers towards the slain Demigod realized that of male devotees towards the Queen of Heaven and the Mother and sustainer of things. If the original Jesus of the myth had not had a mythical mother, it would have been necessary to invent one. Once established, her elevation to the honours of Isis was inevitable.

No less necessary, on the other hand, to the official survival of the new system was a dogmatic limit to new doctrine. Where concrete myth and ritual enlarged the scope of the cult, freedom of abstract speculation dissipated its forces and menaced its very existence. All manner of streams might usefully flow into its current, but when the main river threatened to break up into a hundred searching rivulets there was a prospect of its being wholly lost in the sands. This danger, sometimes charged solely upon the Gnostics, arose with the very first spread of the cult: every Pauline epistle, early or late, exhibited the scope it gave for schism and faction. Mere random "prophesying," which it was difficult to discountenance, meant endless novelties of doctrine. At every stage at which we can trace it the early Church is divided, be it by Judaism against Gentilism, faith against works, Paul against Apollos, or one Jesus against another: the very nature of the forces which made possible the propaganda involved their frequent clash; and multitudes of converts were doubtless won and lost in the chances of sectarian strife. When to the Jews and proselytes and illiterates of the earlier movement there began to be added speculative Gentile Gnostics, for whom Yahweh was but one of many rival tribal Gods, and Jesus one of many competitive slain Saviours, there came with them a species of heresy which bade fair to lull all schism in a euthanasia of universalism. The theosophies of Egypt and the East were alike drawn upon in the name of Christism, and there resulted endless webs of grandiose mysticism, in which the problem of the Cosmos was verbally solved by schemes of intermediary powers between deity and man, and endless periods of transformation between the first and the last states of matter. In these philosophies Jesus was explained away or allegorized just as were the Gods of paganism, and the motive force of fanatical ill-will against those deities on the score of their characters was lost in a reconciling symbolism. Framed for brooding minds that could not rest in the primitive solutions of the popular cults, such systems on the other hand could never attach or hold the mass of the people; and as they were yet produced on all hands, the Christian organization was soon forced to define its dogma if it would keep any distinguishing faith. Insofar as so-called Gnosticism lent itself obediently to the embellishment of the canonical writings and the confutation of the heathen--as in the works of Clement of Alexandria--it was accepted without much demur; but all new or independent theory was tabooed. Speculative minds were dangerous things in a church aiming at practical success; and they were assiduously barred out.

The conservative process, of which we shall trace the history, was carried on partly by documentary forgeries, partly by more honest polemic, partly by administrative action and the voting of creeds. But in the nature of the case the forgeries, where successful, were the most central and decisive forces; and we may still see, in the schematic narratives of the Acts of the Apostles, in the interpolations of the Apocalypse, in some of the readjustments of the gospel text, and in the more obviously spurious Pauline epistles, how faction and fanaticism were fought with intelligent fraud; and how a troublesome popular delusion was guarded against by creating another that lent itself to official ends. The "true" creed is just the creed which was able to survive.

? 5. Cosmic Philosophy

As we have seen, Gentile philosophy did actually enter into the sacred books of the new faith, notably in the doctrine of the Logos or "Word," which in the fourth gospel virtually reshapes the entire Jesuist system. That gospel, rather than the preaching of Paul, is the doctrinal foundation of Gentile Christianity. In the synoptics the founder broadly figures as a Judaic Messiah, who is shortly to come again, at the world's end, to judge the quick and the dead; and only for a community convinced of the speedy approach of doomsday could such a religion suffice. In the Pauline as in the other epistles we see the belief in full play; and only in one of the later forgeries is a caveat inserted. When the period loosely specified for the catastrophe was clearly passed, and the Church had become an economic institution like another, it must needs present a religion for a permanent world if it was to hold its own; and while the changing speculations of the Gnostics had to be vetoed in the interests of solidarity, some scheme of philosophic dogma was needed which, like theirs, should envisage the world as an enduring process. Pauline polemic did but claim for believing Gentiles a part in the Jewish salvation, and such a view had been reached by Philo before Paul. The fourth gospel, substituting the Christ-sacrifice for the Jewish Passover, and putting a world-Logos in place of a descendant of David, gave the theoretic basis of a permanent cosmopolitan cult analogous to those of Egypt and Persia. The invention of a gentilizing history of the first apostles was a part of the same process of adaptation; but the fourth gospel supplied the religion for the Church which the official adaptors sought to develop.

Such an evolution was psychologically prepared for by the whole drift of latter-day Jewish thought outside of Judea. The idea of "the Word" of the deity as an entity, capable of personification, had long belonged to Jewish theology in terms of many passages in the Old Testament, and is but one variant of the psychological process by which Brahmans came to conceive of the Vedas, and Moslems of the Koran, as eternal existences. The Chaldaic word Memra had already much of the mystic significance of Logos, which meant both "word" and "reason"; the books of Proverbs, Job, and the Wisdom of Solomon had made familiar the conception of a personified divine Wisdom, dwelling beside the deity; and the Alexandrian Jew Philo had made the Logos a central figure in his theosophy. But in the theosophies of Egypt and Persia the same conception had long been established; Plato had made it current in the theosophy of the Greeks, combining it with a mystic doctrine of the cross; and Thoth and Hermes and Mithra were already known as the Logos to their worshippers. Thus, whether the fourth gospel were framed at Ephesus or at Alexandria, by a cosmopolitan Jew or by a Gentile proselyte, it had grounds of appeal to every Christist save the original Judaic Jesuists, whose monopoly it was framed to overthrow. It of course gave no coherent philosophy of the universe, and merely evaded the problem of evil, which the Gnostics were constantly seeking to solve; but it was none the worse a religious document for that.

Nonetheless, it needed the stress of circumstance to force it into its fitting place in the new religion. Despite the many passages inserted to bring its narrative into harmony with the other gospels, the fourth differs so much more from them than they do from each other that only the vital needs of the cult in its struggle for existence can account for the final adoption of all four. But these needs were compulsive, and overrode the opposition the fourth gospel evoked. Such a mass of doctrine purporting to come from the very mouth of the founder could not in any case be refused by such a community; and when once the treatise on such grounds had been taken into the canon it played its part in paralyzing the faculty of judgment. The fourth gospel directly excludes the pretence that the God-man was born at Bethlehem; yet it was grouped, like the second, which ignores the tale, with the first and third, which circumstantially yet discordantly enounce it. Where irreconcilable differences on the most essential matters of biographical fact could thus be let pass, the widest divergence of doctrinal idea could find acceptance. The two pressures of predisposition and corporate interest availed to override the difficulties they had created; and the primary momentum of ignorant credulity among the faithful carried all before it. Easiness of belief correlated with proneness to invention, and the religious community cohered, as others do, by force of the gregarious bias, the hostile environment, and the economic interest.

PART II

CHRISTIANITY FROM THE SECOND CENTURY TO THE RISE OF ISLAM

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNESTABLISHED CHURCH

? 1. Numbers and Inner Life

When the "Catholic" Christian Church becomes politically and socially distinguishable in the second century, it is a much less numerous body than is pretended in the literature of its champions. Formulas such as those used in the Acts of the Apostles greatly falsify the state of the case. The first "churches" in the cities of Asia Minor, like the groups addressed by "Paul" in the epistles, were but small conventicles, meeting in private houses. Even in the fourth century, sixty years after Constantine's adoption of the faith, the church of Antioch, one of the oldest and most important, appears to have numbered only a fifth part of the population of the city, or about one hundred thousand out of half-a-million. In the extensive diocese of Neo-Caesarea, in the third century, there were declared to be only seventeen believers; and in the church of Rome itself, in the same century, there were probably not more than fifty thousand members all told out of a population of perhaps a million. In Egypt again there was no church outside Alexandria till about the end of the second century. Thus the language of Justin and Tertullian and other Fathers, echoing the Acts, to the effect that the Christians were everywhere throughout the empire, and that the gospel had been preached and Jesus prayed to in every nation, is mere rhetoric in the oriental taste. Only in the towns of the empire--though often in small towns in the East--did the church exist at all: the pagani or people of the rural districts were so uniformly fixed in their beliefs that their name became for Christians the generic term for the adherents of the old faiths; and though there were some missionary movements in Persia and Arabia, the western provinces were hardly at all reached by the propaganda in the first two centuries. Even in Gaul there were few adherents; while as regards Britain, where there is said to have been a group at York in the third century, there is not to be found a single monumental trace of the presence of Christianity during the four centuries of the Roman occupation, though remains of the Mithraic cult, which flourished in the army, are frequent. At the end of the second century, then, probably not a hundredth part of the population even of the central provinces of the Roman empire was Christianized, while the outlying provinces were practically unaffected.

Of the average inner life of the converts at this period it is possible to form some idea by noting at once the current doctrine, the claims of the apologists, the complaints of the apostolic and later epistles, and the tenour and temper of the whole literature of the Church. Something too may be inferred from the fact that the early believers were mainly easterns even in Rome itself. Even on these data, indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that any concrete character type was predominant; but at several points we are entitled to generalize as between the Christian movement and its antecedents and surroundings. It was, for instance, very weakly developed on the intellectual side, avowedly discouraging all use of reason, and limiting the mental life to religious interests. Save for a certain temperamental and moral energy in some of the Pauline epistles, there is nothing in the propagandist literature of the early Church which bears comparison with the best preceding literature of Greece and Rome. The traditions concerning the apostles present men of a narrow and fanatical vision and way of life, without outlook on human possibilities, joyless save by way of religious exaltation, painfully engrossed in theological contention and apocalyptic forecast. The happiest teachers were perhaps the least intelligent. Papias, bishop at Hierapolis, whom Eusebius later presents as having talked with men who had heard the apostles, is pronounced by that historian to have been of small understanding; and his ideas of the millennium, as passed down, justify the criticism. Other traditional figures of the second century, as the bishops Polycarp and Ignatius, are presented mainly in their character of hortatory martyrs, the most advantageous light in which ungifted men can be placed; and not a line ascribed to them is above suspicion. Of the early Christians in general, indeed, a transfiguring ideal has been shaped in terms of the aspect of martyrdom and persecution--trials which, by forcing men and women back on the central virtues of courage and constancy, positively ennoble character. Such a compensating dignity of endurance is found where it is apt to be least expected--in men and women long broken to oriental tyranny; in Egyptian fellaheen, used to the lash; in peasants wont mutely to toil and obey. But the possibility of such a correlation does not alter the facts of normal life for the types in question. Ignorance and fanaticism and superstition yield their normal fruits in normal conditions. And there is Christian record that even among the martyrs there were men of bad character, seeking a short way to Paradise.

Of the early Christian community many were slaves, and perhaps from three to five per cent paupers. The proportion of women was perhaps as large as it is in the churches of to-day; for it was one of the pagan taunts that to women the preachers preferred above all to address themselves, and rich women members seem to have been relatively numerous. All orders alike believed fervently in evil spirits; and the most constant aspect of their faith was as a protection against demoniacal influence. In the service of the Church of Rome in the third century there were forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolythes or clerks, and fifty "readers," exorcists, and janitors; and the exorcists were at least as hard-worked as any other members of the staff. On the side of morality, much stress was laid on the sins of the flesh, partly because these were the commonest, partly because the idea of an intellectual ethic had not arisen; and while the Church was liable to gusts of persecution its practice was naturally somewhat strict. Men and women who had joined the body mainly for its alms or its agapae were not likely to adhere to it in times of trouble; and the very proclamation of an ascetic standard would primarily attract those persons, found in every community, who had a vocation for asceticism. At almost any period, however, such were to be found in the heretical or dissentient groups as well as in the main body, while the testimony of the Pauline epistles is distinct as to the antinomianism of many "apostolic" converts. Some Gnostic sects were stringently ascetic if others were antinomian, the ? priori principle lending itself alternately to the doctrines that the spirit must mortify the flesh, and that the deeds of the flesh are nothing to the spirit. Within the main body, the conflicting principles of faith and works, then as later, involved the same divergences of practice. The evidence of Tertullian is emphatic as to the illusoriness of much Christian profession in his day in the churches of Carthage, where zeal was at least as abundant as elsewhere.

Taken individually, then, an average Christian of the second century was likely to be an unlettered person of the "lower-middle" or poorer classes; living in a town; either bitterly averse to "idols," theatres, the circus, and the public baths, or persuaded that he ought to be; utterly credulous as to demons and miracles; incapable of criticism as to sacred books; neurotic or respectful towards neurosis; readily emotional towards the crucified God and the sacred mystery in which were given the "body and blood"; devoid alike of aesthetic and of philosophic faculty; without the thought of civic duty or political theory; much given to his ritual; capable of fanatical hatred and of personal malice; but either constitutionally sober and chaste or chronically anxious to be so, and in times of persecution exalted by the passion of self-sacrifice; perhaps then transiently attaining to the professed ideal of love towards enemies. But the effective bonds of union for the community, whether in peace or during persecution, were rather the ruling passion of hostility to pagan beliefs and usages, and the eager hope of "salvation," than any enthusiasm of humanity, social or even sectarian. And, as an orthodox ecclesiastic has remarked, we cannot "even cursorily read the New Testament without being astonished by the allusions so often made to immoral persons calling themselves Christians."

Over such worshippers, in the first centuries, presided a clergy of precarious culture, sometimes marked by force of character, never by depth or breadth of thought. To compare the Christian writers of the ancient world with the pagan thinkers who had preceded them by three or more centuries is to have a vivid sense of the intellectual decadence which had accompanied the growth of imperialism. From Plato to Clement of Alexandria, from Aristotle to Tertullian, there is a descent as from a great plateau to arid plains or airless valleys: the disparity is as between different grades of organism. But even between the early Christian fathers and the pagans near their own time the intellectual and aesthetic contrast is flagrant. Justin Martyr and Clement, put in comparison with either Plutarch or Epictetus, create at once an impression of relative poverty of soul: the higher pagan life is still the richer and the nobler; the Christian temper is more shrill and acrid, even where, as in the case of Clement, it is nourished by learning and pagan metaphysic. Even the cultured and relatively liberal Origen, in his reply to Celsus, is often at a moral disadvantage as against the pagan, who, especially when he passes from mere polemic on Jewish lines to philosophic thought, is distinctly more masculine and penetrating. So far from being less superstitious, the Christian reverts to such vulgar beliefs as that in the magical virtue of certain divine names. Yet Origen, who was born of educated Christian parents, is almost the high-water mark of ancient Christian literature on the side of culture and mental versatility .

Up to the time of Clement and Origen, then, it may be said, the Christian cult had won from paganism hardly one mind of any signal competence; religious humanists such as Plutarch and fine moralists such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus having gone to their graves without being even transiently attracted by it. What laughter was left in literature remained aloof from religion; Lucian could have no place in the church, though it is probably his ridicule of pagan deities that has won the preservation of his works at Christian hands. It is only when the disease of empire has invaded all the sources of the higher life, in the third and fourth centuries, that the Christian writers, themselves representing no intellectual recovery, begin to be comparable, mind for mind, with those of contemporary paganism; and even then largeness of vision seems to linger rather with the mystics of the older way of thought, as Porphyry and Plotinus, than with the bitter polemists of the newer faith, as Cyprian and Arnobius. The moral note which in the modern world is supposed to be typically and primordially Christian, that of the Imitatio Christi, is the one note never struck by the Christian Fathers, or, if sounded, never sustained. It is rather a result of medieval brooding, the outcome of many generations of cloister life and of a settled ecclesiastical order, which walled-in an abnormal peace.

During those ages in which the Christian Church was so spreading as to become at length the fit cultus of the decaying State, its history is almost wholly one of internal and external strifes, conflicts between the Church and its pagan persecutors, between its literary champions and pagan criticism, between the champions of orthodoxy and the innovating heretics, between the partisans of dogmas whose life-and-death struggle was to determine what orthodoxy was to be. The central sociological fact is the existence of an organization with a durable economic life--durable because of ministering to an enduring demand--in a society whose institutions were suffering more and more from economic disease. Of this organization the component parts united to resist and survive external hostility when that arose; and for the command of its power and prestige, later, the conflicting sections strove as against each other. In the history of both forms of strife are involved at once that of its dogmas and that of its hierarchic structure.

? 2. Growth of the Priesthood

In the Jesuist groups of the first century, as we have seen, there were "bishops" or overseers, and other "presbyters" or elders, so named in simple imitation of the usages of other Greek-speaking religious societies, Jewish and Gentile, in the eastern parts of the empire. The bishop was at first merely the special supervisor and distributor of the "collection," whether of money or of other gifts, and was spiritually and socially on the same level with the presbyters and deacons. None was specially ordained, and ordinary members could at need even administer the eucharist. Teaching or preaching was not at first a special function of any member of a group, since any one could be a "prophet" ; but discourses were for a time given by travelling apostles, who aimed at founding new groups, and who ministered the eucharist wherever they went. It lay in the nature of the case, however, that the function of the bishop should gain in moral authority because of its economic importance; and that the informal exhortations or "prophesyings" of the early days, which were always apt to degenerate into the hysterical glossolalia, or unintelligible "tongues," should be superseded by the regular preaching of ostensibly qualified men. In the first century these must have been few, and they would usually be made the acting bishops, who would gradually become more and more identified with the administration of the "mysteries," and would naturally repel "lay" interference. Here again there was pagan precedent, some of the pagan societies having a "theologos," while in all the "bishop" had a certain precedence and authority.

As congregations grew and services multiplied, however, the bishop would need assistance, and to this end presbyters became officially associated with him as con-celebrants. Only gradually, however, did the sacerdotal spirit take full possession of the cult. Liturgy was long a matter of local choice; and it is probable that the complete mystery-play of the Agony and Crucifixion and Resurrection was never performed save at a few large centres, in competition with special pagan attractions of the same kind; but a eucharist, with varying ritual and hymns, sung by special officials, was the primary function of every church. As numbers and revenue increased, men of an ambitious and administrative turn would inevitably tend to enter the movement; and the second century was not out before the avarice and arrogance of leading bishops were loudly complained of. Nonetheless, their self-assertion promoted the growth of the sect. Such men, in point of fact, tended to build up the Church as warlike nobles later built up the fabric of feudalism, or self-seeking "captains of industry" the special structure of modern commercial societies. Righteousness and gentleness and spirituality could no more create a popular and revenue-yielding Church in the Roman empire than they can to-day create and maintain a "paying" industrial organization. An early bishop, indeed, needed to recommend himself to the congregation in order to get elected; but in a large town, with personal magnetism and a staff of priests, he was certain to become a determining force in church affairs. The aspiring priest looked forward to a bishopric for himself; and in an illiterate congregation there could be no effectual resistance to official assumptions which were made with any tact. Thus were the scribes and Pharisees rapidly duplicated.

On one side the character of the early as of the later clergy of the "Catholic" Church has suffered severely from their own affirmation of a primitive theory of morals to which they could not conform. In an age of lessening science and freedom, with growing superstition, the barbarian ideal of asceticism gained ground like other delusions. The idea that by physical self-mortification men attain magical or intercessory power in spiritual things--an idea found in all ancient religions, and enforced in numerous pagan priesthoods--was imposed to some extent on Christism from the first, and became more and more coercive as the cult passed out of Jewish hands. The average presbyter of the second century, accordingly, won his repute for sanctity in many cases by professing celibacy, which in a large number of cases was too hard for him to maintain; and between his own unhappy ideal and the demand of the crowd that he should fulfil it, his life became in general a deception. In these matters the multitude is always preposterously righteous. Aztecs in the pre-Christian period, we know, were wont to put to death professed ascetics who lapsed; and the normal denunciation of priestly immorality in Europe in the Middle Ages seems rarely to have been checked by the thought that the priest's error consisted in taking up a burden he could not bear. That priests ought to be celibate the average priest-taught layman never doubted. Hence a premium on hypocrisy in the period of church-creation. An artificial ethic created an artificial crime, and Christian morality evolved demoralization. In the second century began the practice of open priestly concubinage, often on the na?ve pretence of a purely spiritual union. Denounced periodically by bishops and councils for hundreds of years, it was never even ostensibly checked in the period of the empire; and the later discipline of the Western Church did but drive the symptom beneath the surface to form a worse disorder.

In the Roman period no machinery existed by which celibacy could be enforced. Councils varied in their stringency on the subject, and many bishops were capable of voting for a rule to which they did not in private conform. As for the bishopric of Rome, it had at that time only a ceremonial primacy over the other provinces. In the second century Bishop Victor of Rome is recorded to have passed sentence of excommunication on the easterns who would not conform to his practice in the observation of Easter; but his authority was defied, and his successors do not seem even to have asserted it in any similar degree for centuries. In the third century Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, the first zealous prelatist in the literature of the Church, claimed merely primacy, without superior authority, for the chief bishoprics, and for Rome over the rest. All bishops he held to be spiritually equal--and indeed all presbyters, bishops included. This held good theoretically as late as the fourth and fifth centuries, with the exception that by that time the bishop alone had the right to appoint to Church offices--originally the function of the whole community. But alike the internal and the external conditions made for the creation of a hierarchy. When in the third century the puritan party in the Church at Rome sought to appoint Novatian as its separate bishop, alongside of another, the bishops in the provinces, led by Cyprian, zealously resisted, and secured the principle that no town should have more than one bishop. In other ways the bishops necessarily gathered power. To them had soon to be relegated the right of admitting or refusing new members; and when there arose the question of the treatment of those who lapsed in a time of persecution, there was no way to secure uniformity of method save by leaving the matter to the bishops, who in the main agreed on a rule. For such uniformity they naturally strove in the days of danger; and the Church Synods, which began in the second century and developed in the third, were tolerably unanimous up to the time of the Establishment of the Church under Constantine . It was when the Church as a whole had no longer cause to fear the heathen that the worst strifes arose.

? 3. The Gnostic Movement in the Second Century

In New Testament Greek the same word has to stand for "sect" and "heresy," a fact premonitory of what must happen to every new idea in religion. Any process of reasoning whatever must have led to differences of opinion among the converts of Paul or of the Pauline epistles; and such differences, leading necessarily, among zealots, to animosities, are among the first phenomena of Christism. As we have seen, the chief "heresies" of the first century, stigmatized as such by the later Church, were really independent cults older than itself; and there is reason to think that the "Nicolitaines" execrated in the Apocalypse were really the followers of Paul. At the beginning of the second century, again, the first heretics on record are the Elcesaites, who, however, as we saw, were obviously not an offshoot from the Jesuists, but a separate body, their Christ being a gigantic spirit and their doctrine a cluster of symbolisms. It is with the so-called Gnostics, the claimants to a higher Gnosis or knowledge, that heresy begins in Gentile Christianity; and as some of these are already in evidence in the Pauline epistles, and had interpolated the synoptics , to say nothing of framing the fourth gospel, they may fairly be reckoned among "the first Christians." Ere long, however, they begin clearly to differentiate from the Christism of the New Testament.

If the early Gnostic systems be compared with that of Paul, they will be found to have rather more in common with it than with the Judaic Jesuism from which he ostensibly broke away. It is thus not unlikely that their Christism, like his, is older than that of the gospels, which is primarily of Jewish manufacture. The "Simonians" of Samaria have every appearance of being non-Jewish Christists "before Christ"; and the later Gnostics have several Samaritan affinities. Like "Paul," they have no Jesuine biography; but whereas he ostensibly holds by an actual man Jesus, however nondescript, they usually declare outright for a mere divine phantom, bearing a human semblance, but uncontaminated by mixture with matter, which was the Gnostic symbol for all evil. They did but attach the name of the Christos, and the hope of salvation, to a general theosophy, as Paul attached it to Judaism; and their great preoccupation was to account formally for the existence of evil, which they commonly figured as either an evil power or an essential quality of matter, forever opposed to the principle of good. Hence the allusion to the "oppositions of science falsely so-called"--that is, "the antithesis of the Gnosis"--in the Pauline epistle. But they varied somewhat in details according to their environment, being roughly divisible into two groups--Asiatic and Egyptian.

At the beginning of the second century those of Syria are identified with the teaching of Saturninus of Antioch, in whose theory a good God had made the seven angels, who in turn made the world and created a low type of animal man in God's image, whom, however, God compassionately endowed with a reasonable soul. Of the seven angels one was left to rule the world, and figured as God of the Jews; but the others competed with him; and Satan, the chief evil power, made a race of men with an evil soul. Thereupon the Supreme God sent his son as Jesus Christ, human only in seeming, to bring men to the knowledge of the Father and defeat the rebel angels. Another Syrian, Bardesanes, who lived in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, was less anti-Jewish, and made the one God the creator of the world and of man, who was at first ethereal and pure, but seduced and so degraded to the form of flesh by the Adversary; the Christ's function being to secure a higher future life to those who accept him. From both points of view, mortification of the flesh was a primary duty--all the carnal instincts being evil--and Jesus on the same ground was denied bodily existence. Always the effort is to account for evil as involved in matter, the work not of the Supreme God, but of a subordinate power who will be vanquished. Thus Tatian, a pupil of Justin Martyr and contemporary with Saturninus, makes the world-creator a subordinate God, and seems to have derived Judaism and the gospel similarly from inferior deities. Some, as Bardesanes and Tatian, held by a bodily resurrection; others, as Saturninus and Cerdo , stressed the anti-material principle and denied that the resurrection could be in bodily form. On such an issue, of course, it was easy to compromise in the concept of a "spiritual body" the same to the eye as the real body, but impalpable to touch--in short, the "spirit" of all ages.

It is reasonable to infer that the Gnostic systems were suggested by the spectacle of the earthly Governments around them, no less than by the previous theologies. Even as the Autocrator reigned without governing, and the evils of misgovernment were chargeable on proconsuls, so, it was thought, the head of the universe, the Pantocrator, could not be implicated in the evil wrought under him. Such a conception seems to have first arisen in the great monarchies of the East. It followed, however, that as some satraps and proconsuls governed well, there might be good subordinate deities; and in the system of Basilides the Egyptian, who belonged to the brilliant reign of Hadrian, the attribute of goodness is graded endlessly, down to the angels of the 365th heaven, who made this world and its inhabitants. As in the system of Saturninus, God gives these a reasonable soul, but the angels rebel, and their chief, who becomes God of the Jews, draws on that nation the hatred of all others by his arrogance. Egyptian Gnosticism thus bore the stamp of the old Egyptian pantheism, its every power emanating from the Unbegotten One; while the Asiatic systems embody in some form the Mazdean principle of two opposed powers, of which the worse is only ultimately to be defeated. Egyptian precedent explains also the countless generations of the Gnostic systems of Alexandria. As in Egyptian history dynasty followed on dynasty, and as in the pantheon God was begotten of God, so in the system of Basilides the Unbegotten produces from himself Nous, Mind; which produces the Logos; which produces Phronesis, Judgment; which produces Sophia and Dynamis, Wisdom and Power; and these last in turn produce angels, who in turn reproduce others down to the 365th grade. The system of Valentinus, assigned to the period of Antoninus Pius, frames fresh complications, partly suggestive of an immemorial bureaucracy which had duplicated itself in the heavens, partly of an ? priori psychology which sought to explain the universe, now by first principles, after the fashion of the early mythology of Rome, now by adaptations of the current theosophy.

In the hands of Valentinus religion becomes an imbroglio which only an expert could master; and the functions of the Christ in particular are a mere tangle of mystery. Nous, the first of many "AEons," is the "only begotten" Son, his mother being Ennoia, Thought; yet with him is born Truth; and these three with the Father make a first Tetrad. Then Nous produces the Logos and Life; which beget Man and the Church; which two pairs beget more AEons; and so on. In a later stage, after a "fall," Nous begets the Christos and the Holy Spirit; while later still the AEons produce the AEon Jesus, Sophia and Horos playing a part in the evolution. Such a maze, though it is said to have had many devotees, could not possibly be the creed of a popular Church, even in Egypt; and wherever the gospels went their ostensibly concrete Jesus held his own against such spectral competition. The systems which made Jesus non-human and those which made of him an elusive abstraction were alike disadvantaged as against that which declared him to have been born of woman and to have suffered the last agony for the sons of men. Women could weep for the crucified Man-God as they had immemorially done for Adonis and Osiris: they could not shed tears for a phantasmagoric series of Nous--Logos--Christ--AEons--Jesus, begetting and begotten.

Other Gnostics, still making mystical pretensions, were content to represent Jesus as a superior human being born of Joseph and Mary in the course of nature. Carpocrates of Alexandria, who so taught in the reign of Hadrian, had a large following. Such tolerance of "materialism," however, brought on the sect charges of all manner of sensuality; and there is categorical record that, following Plato, they sought to practise community of women. Similarly, the Basilidians were charged with regarding all bodily appetites as indifferent, their founder having set his face against the glorification of virginity, and taught that Jesus was not absolutely sinless, since God could never permit an innocent being to be punished. There is no proof, however, that any sect-founder was openly antinomian; and while license doubtless occurred in many, we have the evidence of the Pauline epistles that it could rise in the heart of the primitive Church as easily as in any sect. In the same way, whatever might be the doctrine of particular sections, it may be taken as certain that the charge of bowing before persecution, cast at some, held partly true of nearly all.

Systems such as the bulk of those above described, drawing as they did on any documents rather than the Old and New Testaments, are obviously not so much Christian schisms as differentiations from historic Christianity--developments, in most cases, of an abstract Christism on lines not merely Gentile but based on Gentile religions, as against the Jewish. Broadly speaking, therefore, they tended to disappear from the Christist field, inasmuch as paganism had other deities better suited to the part of the Gnostic Logos. The intermediate type, bodiless at best, must die out. Gnosticism had not only no canon of its own, but no thought of one: while the fashion lasted every decade saw a new system, refining on the last and multiplying its abstractions, till the very term gnosis must have become a byword. Success, as has been said above, must remain with the simple and concrete system, especially if that were organized; and the Gnostics of the second century attempted no general organization. Yet Gnosticism left a lasting impress on Christianity. In its earlier stages, as we have seen, it modified the gospels; and after it had evolved away from the gospel basis it left an influence on the more philosophically-minded writers of the Church, notably Clement of Alexandria, who is as openly anxious to approve himself a "good Gnostic" as to found on the accepted sacred books of the Church. Deriving as it partly did from the Jewish Platonist Philo, it brought into the Church his fashion of reducing Biblical narratives to allegories--a course much resorted to not only by Origen but by Augustine, and very necessary for the defence of Hebrew tales against pagan criticism. Further, the regular practice of the Church in the matter of separating catechumens from initiates was an adoption of the Gnostic principle of esoteric knowledge.

In yet other ways, however, Gnosticism influenced early Christianity. It was the Gnostics who first set up in it literary habits: they were the first to multiply documents of all kinds; and it is not unlikely that their early additions to the gospels gave a stimulus to its expansion on other lines. They were, in short, the first to introduce a tincture of letters and art into the cult; and it was their spirit that shaped the fourth gospel, which gave to Christism the only philosophical elements it ever possessed. They are not indeed to be regarded as having cultivated philosophy to any good purpose, though they passed on some of the philosophic impulse to the later Platonists. Rather the average Gnostic is to be conceived as a leisured dilettante in an age of learned ignorance and foiled intelligence, lending an eager ear to new mysticisms, as so many half-cultured idlers are seen still doing in our own day. They cared as much for abracadabral amulets, apparently, as for theories; and their zeal for secret knowledge had in it something of the spirit of class exclusiveness, and even of personal arrogance. It would seem as if, when tyrannies in the ancient world made an end of the old moral distinctions of classes, men instinctively caught at new ways of being superior to their fellows--for the spirit of Gnosticism arose among the later Greek pagans, who here followed the lead of Egyptian priests, as well as among Samaritans and Grecized Jews. At most we may say of the Gnostics that they were much more concerned than the orthodox to frame a complete and consistent theistic theory of things, and that in their learned-ignorant way they sought to walk by reason as well as by faith. Necessarily they were in a minority. It was, however, their theoretic bent, surviving in the gospel-reading Church, that determined the dogmatic development of the Christist creed. Their recoil from the conception of a Saviour-God in a human body comes out in the later debates and creeds as in the fourth gospel; and if the final doctrine of the Trinity be not truly Gnostic, it is because the Gnostics showed more concern for plausibility, and never aimed at tying thought down forever to a plainly self-contradictory formula. Much of their movement probably survived in Manichaeism, which, though sufficiently dogmatic, never flaunted such propositions as those of the Nicene creed, and was a critical thorn in the flesh of the Church. Even their amulets seem to have had a Christian vogue; and the worship of angels, which began to flourish among Catholics in the fourth century, seems to have been a reflex of their teaching.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet