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

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.

In some respects, finally, the modern Church has confusedly reverted to their view of a future state. While the "orthodox" Christians of the second century believed that souls at death went to the under-world, to be raised with the body for the approaching millennium, or thousand-years reign of Christ, the Gnostics, scouting the millennium as a grossly materialistic conception, held that at death the soul ascended to heaven. That appears to be the prevailing fancy among Protestants at the present day, though men have grown cautious of formal dicta on the subject.

? 4. Marcionism and Montanism

Apart from Gnosticism, the Church of the second century was affected by certain heretical or sectarian movements which centred round single teachers of an influential sort, in particular Marcion of Sinope and Montanus, who became the founders of something like separate churches. Montanus, like Manichaeus, has mythical aspects; and it is impossible to be sure of the historicity of either; but Marcionism sets up no such difficulty. Marcion, who was a disciple of the Gnostic Cerdo, and like him flourished in the reign of Antoninus Pius, held by some of the main Gnostic theories, but differed from the Gnostics in general in that he founded solely on New Testament writings and did not absolutely oppose Judaism. In his system the Supreme God, who is Good, creates a Demiurge or world-maker, who is merely Just or legalist, the God of the Jews; while Satan, the offspring of Matter, governs the heathens. Only the Christians are ruled by the Good God, who is first revealed to men solely by the Christ. It was in this way that he applied the Gnostic principle of "oppositions" or "antitheses," in a work bearing that title. His ethic appears to have been a sectarian version of that of Bardesanes, who had defined the good as those who did good even to the wicked; the just as those who did good only to the good; and the wicked as those who did evil even to the good. It does not seem to have occurred to Marcion that in classing all pagans as outside of the pale of goodness he was stultifying his own avowed principle of divine love and mercy; but in this respect at least he was not heretical, for all who bore the Christian name agreed in limiting salvation to Christists, and dooming all other men to hell-fire.

That he was a fanatic of exceptional force of character is proved by the facts that it was he who forced on the Church the problem of a canon, he being the first to form one, by way, as he explained, of excluding Jewish documents and Jewish interpolations in the gospel and the Pauline epistles; and that he was able to form a separate organization, which subsisted for centuries, with some variations in doctrine, alongside of the "catholic" Church, being heard of as late as the eighth century. The controversies he set up affected the whole literature of the Church for generations; and though it was a point of honour with the orthodox to accuse him of corrupting the texts as well as the faith, it is finally held that some of his readings of the third gospel, which he specially favoured, are really the original ones. Inasmuch, however, as he laid stress on asceticism, to the extent of prohibiting marriage, he necessarily failed to attract the multitude, though his was one of the influences which fostered ascetic ideas within the Church from his time onwards.

The movement of Montanus, known also as the Cataphrygian heresy, has two aspects--that of a sect apparently founded by a zealot of strong personality, who felt that he had special inner light and claimed to be inspired by the Paraclete promised in the gospel, and that of a general reaction against officialism in the Church, somewhat in the spirit of the Quakers of the Reformation period. It stressed all the extremer social tendencies of the early Church, the prediction of the end of the world, the impropriety of marriage and child-bearing in prospect of the catastrophe, the multiplication of fasts, the absolute condemnation of second marriages, the renunciation of earthly joys in general. Christ, said Montanus, had withdrawn the indulgences granted by Moses; and through himself, the Paraclete, cancelled those given by Paul. Thus true religion, having had its infancy under Judaism, and its youth under the gospel, had reached maturity under the Holy Spirit . Hardness of heart had reigned till Christ; weakness of flesh till the Paraclete. A special feature of the Montanist schism--which spread far, and ultimately absorbed Tertullian, who for a time had opposed it--was the association of the founder with two wealthy women of rank, Maximilla and Priscilla, who endowed the movement. It is noteworthy that this special growth of asceticism took its rise in Phrygia, one of the regions specially associated in pagan antiquity with sensuous and orgiastic worship. It would seem as if an age of indulgence led in natural course to a neurotic recoil. In any case it is neurosis that speaks in the ascetic polemic of Tertullian, who became a typical Montanist.

Montanism, it has been said, was "all but victorious"; but its victory was really impossible in the circumstances. It would have meant arresting the growth of Christism to the form of a moribund State Church by depriving it of all popular attraction; and the vested interests were too great to permit of such a renunciation. The movement may be loosely compared to the secession of more rigid bodies from the relaxing sects of Methodism and Calvinism in our own time: voluntary austerity must always be in a minority. A Church which absolutely refused to retain or readmit any who committed a cardinal sin or lapsed during persecution--saying they might be saved by God's grace, but must not be allowed human forgiveness--was doomed to the background. But Montanism, appealing as it did to an ideal of holiness which the average Christian dared not repudiate, influenced the main body, especially through the writings of such a valued polemist as Tertullian, who taunted them with being inferior even to many pagans in the matter of chastity and monogamy. The main body was not to be metamorphosed; but it read the lesson as inculcating the need for at least nominal priestly celibacy. Every notable "heresy" so-called seems thus to have left its mark on the Church.

What above all is proved by the movements of Marcion and Montanus is the power of organization in that period to maintain a sect with sacred books of any kind. They had learned the lesson taken from Judaism by the first Christists, and proceeded to show that just as organized Jesuism could live apart from Judaism in the Gentile field, so new Christist sects could live apart from the orthodox Church when once separation was forced on them. Montanism, like Marcionism, survived for centuries, and seems to have been at length suppressed only by sheer violence on the part of the Christian emperors, who could persecute far more effectually than pagans ever did, having the Church as an instrument. In the face of such developments, and still more in view of the later success of Manichaeism, which, as we shall see, applied still better the principle of organization, there can be no longer any difficulty in accounting for the rise of Christism on purely natural grounds. Given the recognition of a few essential conditions, the creation of a sect was a very simple and facile matter. Montanism and Manichaeism successively endured more persecution, pagan and Christian, than the Christian Church ever did; and it was only the essential unpopularity of the ideals of Montanism that permitted of its suppression as a sect even by the persecuting established Church. Manichaeism, as we shall see, was almost insuppressible, even when political changes had given the Church a power of centralization and coercion which otherwise could never have been developed. At the end of the third century, in short, the Church of its own nature was rapidly approaching disruption into new and irreconcilable organizations.

? 5. Rites and Ceremonies

Apart from the habit of doctrinal discussion, derived from Judaism, the Christianity of the third century had distinctly become as much a matter of ritual and ceremonial as any of the older pagan cults. Churches built for worship, rare in the second century, had become common, and images had already begun to appear in them, while incense was coming into general use, despite the earlier detestation of it as a feature of idolatry. In the wealthier churches gold and silver medals were often seen. Pagan example had proved irresistible in this as in other matters.

The eucharist, commonly administered on Sundays, was regarded as absolutely necessary to salvation and resurrection; and on that account infants were made to partake of it, this before baptism had been declared to be essential in their case. Only the baptized were allowed to be present at the celebration; but portions of the consecrated bread and wine were taken away for sick members, and believed to have a curative virtue. The sign of the cross was now constantly used in the same spirit, being held potent against physical and spiritual evil alike, insofar as any such distinction was drawn. But diseases, as among savages in all ages, were commonly regarded as the work of evil spirits, and medical science was generally disowned, the preferred treatment being exorcism. A baptized person might further use the Lord's Prayer, with its appeal against the Evil One--a privilege denied to the catechumen or seeker for membership.

? 6. Strifes over Primary Dogma

The nucleus for a theistic-Christist creed, as we have seen, was given to the Church in the fourth gospel. The first Jewish Jesuists were simple Unitarians; and the Jesus of Paul, so far as can be safely inferred from epistles indefinitely interpolated, was certainly no part of a trinity in unity. At the beginning of the second century the "orthodox" Christists had no more definite theology than had the unlettered believers in any pagan Saviour-God; and at most the gospels taught them to regard the supernaturally-born Christ as having ascended to heaven, to sit in visible form at the right hand of the Father, as Herakles or Dionysos or Apollo might sit by his Father Zeus. At the middle of the century Justin Martyr speaks of the Logos not as a personal form of deity, but as the inspiration given by God to men in different degrees at different times. It is after him that the fourth gospel begins to do its work. Christian apologists, deriding the beliefs of the pagans, had to meet the charge that they too were polytheists, and the old pagan challenge, put to pagans: If the suffering Saviour were a man, why worship him? if he were a God, why weep for his sufferings?

An attempt to meet the difficulty was made in the heresy of Praxeas, a member of the Church who, coming from Asia to Rome late in the century, seems to have taught that the Son and the Holy Spirit were not distinct from the Father, but simply functions of the One God, the Father having descended into the Virgin and been born as Jesus Christ. At once he was accused of "making the Father suffer" on the cross, and his sect accordingly seem to have been among the first called Patripassians. In the same or the next century No?tus of Smyrna is found preaching the same doctrine; and in the hands of Sabellius of Libya, whose name was given to it by his opponents, the teaching became one of the most influential heresies of the age. Sabellius in fact formulated that theory of the Trinity which alone gives it formal plausibility: the three personae were for him not persons, but aspects or modes of the deity, as power, wisdom, and goodness; or law, mercy, and guidance--a kind of solution which in later times has captivated many theologians, including Servetus and Coleridge. But Sabellius, like his predecessors, had to meet the epithet of "Patripassian," and he appears to have parried it with the formula that only a certain energy proceeding from the Divine Nature had been united to the man Jesus. In the way of rationalizing the irrational and giving consistency to contradictories, the Church could never do better than this. Under such a theorem, however, the Man-God as such theoretically disappeared; and as that was precisely the side of the creed which identified the cult, gave it popularity, and won it revenue, Sabellianism, though accepted by many, even by many bishops, could not become the official doctrine. It persistently remained, nevertheless, in the background, the idea taking new forms and names in succeeding generations, as new men arose with courage and energy enough to reopen the insoluble strife, during a period of four hundred years.

A solution by a different approach was offered by such second-century teachers as Theodotus of Byzantium, a learned tanner living in Rome; another of the same name, a banker; and Artemon, all founders of sects by whom Jesus was regarded as merely a superior man, supernaturally born. As this form of the Unitarian doctrine struck directly at the essential element of the Christ's deity, in respect of which the cult vied with others of the same type, it was no more generally acceptable than the Sabellian; and it is more than likely that the mere odium theologicum gave rise to the story that Theodotus had first denied Christ under persecution, and then framed a theology for his predicament. Yet such doctrines as his must have gone on gaining ground among the more stirring minds; for when in the next century Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, began to restate the Unitarian thesis, he found an extensive following. The Logos, he taught, was not a person distinct from the Father, but merely his wisdom, which descended into but was not united with Jesus. Given forth about the year 260, Paul's teaching was condemned by a council at Antioch in 264, he giving a promise of "reformation" which he did not keep. Another council, which met in 269 or 270, deposed and excommunicated him; but he refused to obey, and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, who then ruled Antioch, protected him. Not till 272, when Antioch was retaken by Aurelian, did the majority succeed in ousting him, by the emperor's express intervention. And still the "heresy" persisted, and the theological hatreds grew. It belonged to the nature of the religion, a pyramid poised on its apex, to be in unstable equilibrium wherever any breath of reason could blow.

The development of the councils in the third century is a proof at once of the growth of organization in the Church and of the need for it. It is not to be supposed that all orthodox Churchmen looked practically to the main chance; it is clear, on the contrary, that many were moved by the conservative zeal of the Bibliolater of all ages, as the heretics were presumably moved by a spirit of reason; but the bishops must at all times have included many who looked at questions of creed from the standpoint of finance, like so many members of modern political parties; and they would be apt to turn the scale in every serious dispute. Even they, however, with whatever aid from polemical propaganda, could not long have availed to preserve anything like a preponderating main body if the Church were left to itself. The polemical writers, broadly speaking, converted nobody, but merely inflamed those already convinced; and party strife was becoming more and more comprehensive, more furious, more menacing, when the Church was saved from itself by the State.

RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE

? 1. Persecutions

It was involved in the aggressive attitude of the Christist movement that it should be persecuted by a partly countervailing fanaticism. The original bias of all ancient religion, indeed, in virtue of the simple self-interest of priesthoods, had been to resent and suppress any new worship; and though nowhere else is the course so ferociously enjoined as in the Hebrew sacred books, there are many traces of it in the pagan world. Thus the Dionysiak cult had been violently resisted on its introduction into Greece; and the early Roman law against foreign worships was turned against it, under circumstances plainly exaggerated by Livy, about 187 B.C. Later a religious panic led to the official suppression in Rome of the worships of Isis and Serapis. Empire, however, everywhere involved some measure of official toleration of diverging cults; and as in Babylon and Egypt, so under the Hellenistic and Roman systems, the religions of each of the provinces were more or less assimilated in all. When even early Athens had been constrained to permit the non-aggressive cults of the aliens within her walls, far-reaching empires could do no less. Indeed, the very vogue of Christism depended on the fact that throughout the empire there was taking place a new facility of belief in strange Gods. There can be no more complete mistake than the common assertion that it made its appeal in virtue of the prevalence of "desolating scepticism." On the contrary, rationalism had practically disappeared; and even the Roman pagans most adverse to Christism were friendly to other new cults.

Had the Christian cult been, like its non-Jewish contemporaries, a mere effort to "worship God according to conscience," it need not have undergone pagan persecution any more than they, or than Judaism, save when the State imposed the duty of worshipping the emperor's statue. A God the more was no scandal to polytheists. Christism had taken from Judaism, however, as a first principle, the detestation of "idols," and its propaganda from the first had included a violent polemic against them. For the Christians the pagan Gods were not unrealities: they were evil daemons, constantly active. Insofar, too, as the first Jesuists in the western part of the empire shared the Jewish hatred for Rome that is expressed in the Apocalypse, they were likely enough to provoke Roman violence. A constant prediction of the speedy passing away of all things was in itself a kind of sedition; and when joined with contumely towards all other religions it could not but rouse resentment. Thus, though the story of the great Neronian massacre is, as already noted, an apparent fiction as regards the Christians, being unnoticed in the book of Acts, Jesuists and Jews alike ran many chances of local or general hostility under the empire from the first. The express doctrines, put in the mouth of the founder, that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and to create strife in families, were not fitted to soften the prejudices aroused by the religious claims of the new faith; and in the time of Tertullian they were defined in the west as "enemies of the Gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, and of all nature."

In all periods alike, from the end of the first century down to Constantine, there was no doubt much chronic cruelty. The letter from the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, cited by Eusebius and assigned to the year 161, is a doubtful document; but the savageries there described were only too possible. Public cruelty seems to have worsened in the very period in which the inhabitants of cities had become most unused to war, and the finer minds had grown most humane; like the other animal instincts, it had grown neurotic in conditions of vicious idleness, and many men had become virtuosi in cruelty as in lust. The Christian gospel itself now held up "the tormentors" as typical of the processes of divine punishment; and torture was for many an age to be a part of Christian as of pagan legal procedure.

Insofar as persecution was legalized, it is to be understood not as a putting down of a new religious belief, but as an attack on its political and social side. In the case, for instance, of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who after a flight and a banishment was put to death under Valerian and Gallienus , the bishop's far-reaching activities are the presumptive reason for his fate. It is to be remembered, as Gibbon notes, that in ten years of Cyprian's tenure of office four emperors themselves died by the sword, with their families and their adherents. At times, no doubt, the attack on Christians was unprovoked, consisting as it might in a challenge to a Christian to swear allegiance by or sacrifice to the statue of the emperor, when he was willing to swear by his own creed. The public worship of the emperor was the one semblance of a centralized religious organization which, like that of the Christian Church, existed throughout the empire. Precedented by old Egyptian and eastern usage, and by the practice of Alexander and his successors, it had first appeared in Rome in the offer of the cringing senate to deify Julius Caesar, and in the systematic measures of Augustus to have Julius worshipped as a God , an honour promptly accorded to himself in turn. The apotheosis was signalized by giving the names of Julius and Augustus to the months Quintilis and Sextilis; and only the final unpopularity of Tiberius prevented the substitution of his name in turn for that of September, an honour offered to and refused by him in his earlier life.

Some of the madder emperors later tried to carry on the process of putting themselves in the calendar, but were duly disobeyed after death. Detested emperors, such as Tiberius and Nero and Domitian, were even refused the apotheosis; but in general the title of divus was freely accorded, so abject had the general mind grown under autocracy; and it was usual in the provinces to worship the living emperor in a special temple in association with the Genius of Rome; while the cults of some emperors lasted long after their death. The common sense as well as the sense of humour of some rulers led them to make light of the institution; and the jest of the dying Vespasian, "I fancy I am turning God," is one of several imperial witticisms on the subject; but it lay in the nature of autocracy, in Rome as in Egypt or in Incarian Peru, to employ sagaciously all methods of abasing the human spirit, so as to secure the safety of the throne. One of the most obvious means was to deify the emperor--a procedure as "natural" in that age as the deification of Jesus, and depending on the same psychological conditions. And though the person of the emperor was seldom quite safe from assassination by his soldiery, the imperial cult played its part from the first in establishing the fatal ideal of empire. No sequence of vileness or incompetence in the emperors, no impatience of the insecurity set up by the power of the army to make and unmake the autocrat, no experience of the danger of a war of claimants, ever seems to have made Romans dream of a saner and nobler system. Manhood had been brought too low.

Imperialism being thus an official religion in itself, the cult of the emperor lay to the hands of any magistrate who should be disposed to put a test to a member of the sect which decried all established customs and blasphemed all established Gods. It was the recognized way of imposing the oath of allegiance apart from any specific law. Where such a procedure was possible, any malicious pagan might bring about a stedfast Christian's death. There is Christian testimony, however, that many frenzied believers brought martyrdom wilfully on themselves by outrages on pagan temples and sacred statues; and it is Tertullian who tells how Arrius Antoninus, pro-consul in Asia, drove from him a multitude of frantic fanatics seeking death, with the amazed demand to know whether they had not ropes and precipices. The official temper evidently varied, as did that of the Christians. In the period before Diocletian, save for the intrigues of pagan priests and provincial demagogues, and the normal suspicions of autocratic power, there was nothing in the nature of a general and official animosity, though the Christian attitude was always unconciliatory enough. But by the beginning of the fourth century the developments on both sides had created a situation of strain and danger. The great effort of Diocletian to give new life to the vast organism of the empire, first by minute supervision, and then by sub-division under two emperors, called Augusti, and two Caesars, wrought a certain seriousness of political interest throughout the bureaucracy; and the Christian body, long regarded with alternate contempt and dislike, had become so far organized and so considerable a force that none who broadly considered the prospects of the State could avoid reckoning with it.

It is not to be forgotten that the emperors and the bureaucracy had some excuse for a policy of suppression in the bitter strifes of the Christian sects and sections. Eusebius confesses that these were on the verge of actual warfare, bishop against bishop and party against party, each seeking for power; and for all it was a matter of course to accuse opponents of the worst malpractices. Some of the darkest charges brought by the pagans against Christians in general were but distributions of those brought by the orthodox against heretics, and by Montanists and others against the orthodox. A credulous pagan might well believe that all alike carried on vile midnight orgies, and deserved to be refused the right of meeting. It is not probable, however, that the two emperors and the persecuting Caesar proceeded on any concern for private morals; and though Galerius was a zealous pagan with a fanatical mother, the motive of the persecution was essentially political. What happened was that the passions of the zealots among the pagans had now something like free scope; and, unless the record in Eusebius is sheer fable, the work was often done with horrible cruelty. On the other hand, there is Christian testimony to the humanity of many of the better pagans, who sheltered their Christian friends and relatives; and the Caesar Constantius Chlorus, a tolerant pagan, who ruled in Gaul and Britain and Spain, gave only a formal effect to the edict of the emperors, destroying churches and sacred books, but sparing their owners. The fact, finally, that in ten years of persecution the number of victims throughout the eastern and central empire appears to have been within two thousand, goes to suggest that the mass of the Christians either bowed to the storm or eluded it. Bitter discussions, reviving some of the previous century, rose afterwards as to the proper treatment of the traditores, those who surrendered and forswore themselves; and the more zealous sects and churches either imposed long penances or refused to receive back the lapsed. As the latter course would only weaken themselves, the majority of the churches combined policy with penalty.

The time was now at hand when the Church, from being an object of aversion to the autocracy, was to become its instrument. Just before his death in 311, Galerius, who was little of a statesman, began to see what Diocletian would doubtless have admitted had he lived much longer, and what Constantius Chlorus had probably suggested to his colleagues, that the true policy for the government was to adopt instead of crushing the Christian organization. Only the original anticivism of the cult, probably, had prevented a much earlier adoption of this view by the more politic emperors. It was the insistence on the imminent end of the world, the preaching of celibacy, the disparagement of earthly dignitaries, the vehement assault on the standing cults of the State, no less than the refusal to sacrifice to the emperor's statue, that had so long made Christism seem the natural enemy of all civil government. The more the Church grew in numbers and wealth, however, the more its bishops and priests tended to conform to the ordinary theory of public life; and as theirs was now the only organization of any kind that reached far throughout the State, save the State itself and the cult of the emperors, the latter must evidently either destroy it or adopt it. The great persecution, aiming at the former end, served only to show the futility of official persecution for such a purpose, since pagans themselves helped to screen staunch Christians, and the weaker had but to bow before the storm. Already Constantine, acting with a free hand on his father's principles, had given complete tolerance to the Christians under his sway; and Maxentius, struggling with him for the mastery of the West, had done as much. Even in the East, Maximin had alternately persecuted and tolerated the Christians as he had need to press or pacify Galerius. The language used by Galerius, finally, in withdrawing the edict of persecution, suggests that besides recognizing its failure he had learned from his opponents to conceive the possibility of attaching to the autocracy a sect so much more widely organized and so much more zealous than any of the other subsisting popular religions, albeit still numbering only a fraction of the whole population.

To many of the Christians, on the other hand, long persecution had doubtless taught the wisdom of recanting the extremes of doctrine which had made even sceptical statesmen regard them as a danger to any State. It is clear that bishops like Eusebius of Caesarea would readily promise to the government a loyal attention to its interests in the event of its tolerating and befriending the Church; and the sacred books offered texts for any line of public action. The empire, always menaced by barbarism on its frontiers, needed every force of union that could be used within; and here, finally adaptable to such use, was the one organization that acted or was fitted to act throughout the whole. To the leading churchmen, finally, association with the State was the more welcome because on the one hand general persecution would cease, and on the other all the party leaders could hope to be able by the State's means to put down their opponents. A generation before, in the year 272, the Emperor Aurelian, on the express appeal of the party of bishops who had deposed Paul of Samosata, had intervened in that quarrel to give effect to the will of the majority, which otherwise could not have been put in force; and such occasions were sure to arise frequently. It needed only another innovating emperor to bring about the coalition thus prepared.

? 2. Establishment and Creed-Making

On the abdication of the co-emperors Diocletian and Maximian, the Caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, became the Augusti; the former, as senior, taking the East, and the latter the West. At once the plans of Diocletian began to miscarry; and Galerius, instead of raising to the Caesarship, as the other had wished, Maxentius the son of Maximian and Constantine the already distinguished son of Constantius, gave the junior titles to his nephews Severus and Maximin. The speedy death of Constantius, however, secured the election of Constantine to the purple by his father's troops in Britain; and there ensued the manifold strifes which ended in Constantine's triumph. Maxentius, and his father, who returned to power, put down Severus; and Maximian gave his daughter as wife to Constantine, thus creating a state of things in which three emperors were leagued against a fourth and one Caesar. Soon Maximian and Maxentius quarrelled, the father taking refuge first with Constantine and later with Galerius; who, however, proceeded to create yet another emperor, Licinius. Immediately the Caesar Maximin revolted, and forced Galerius to make him Augustus also. The old Maximian in the meantime went to league himself afresh with Constantine, who, finding him treacherous, had him strangled. Soon after, Galerius dying , Maximin and Licinius joined forces; while Maxentius, who held Italy and Africa, professing to avenge his father, declared war on Constantine, who held Gaul. The result was the defeat and death of the former, leaving Constantine master of the whole West . In 314 he fell out with Licinius, who had in the meantime destroyed Maximin, and won from him Illyrium, Macedonia, and Greece. For ten years thereafter Constantine divided the empire with Licinius; then, quarrelling afresh with his rival, he captured and strangled him, and was sole autocrat .

Out of this desperate drama emerged Christianity as the specially favoured cult of the Roman empire. Constantine, we saw, had protected the Christians from the first, as his father had done before him; and Licinius had acquiesced in the same policy, though in his final war with Constantine he persecuted the Christians in order to attach pagans to his cause. There has been much discussion, nevertheless, as to whether Constantine turned Christian on political or on religious grounds. The fact seems to be that, in the ordinary spirit of ancient religion, he trusted to have the support of the God of the Christians in his great struggle with Maxentius, who appealed to the Gods of paganism with old and evil rites; and that after his first great success he became more and more confirmed in his choice. The story, however, of his having the labarum presented to him in a dream or a vision is an obvious fiction, possible only to the ignorance of the first Christian historians, who read the Greek letters Xp --though the tradition ran that the accompanying words, "In this sign conquer," were in Latin--in a solar symbol that had appeared on Egyptian and other coins many centuries before, and had no reference whatever to the name of Christ, though Constantine used it for that on his standards. A similar tale is told of his son Constantius, on whose coins, however, the symbol is associated with the pagan Goddess of Victory. For the rest, Constantine was a Christian like another. His father had been a monotheist, who protected the Christians on philosophical principles; and from the constant success of Constantius in all his undertakings, as compared with the ill fortune of his own rivals, the son argued that the religion of "One God" was propitious to his house. His personal success in war was always his main argument for the Christian creed, and in such an age it was not the least convincing. The fact that he postponed his baptism till shortly before his death is not to be taken as necessarily indicating any religious hesitations on his part, though such hesitation may have been his motive. Multitudes of Christians in that age did the same thing, on the ground that baptism took away all sin, and that it was bad economy to receive it early. In his case such a reason was specially weighty, and there is no decisive reason to suppose that he had any other of a religious nature. Since, however, the pagans still greatly outnumbered the Christians, he could not afford to declare definitely against all other cults; and, beginning by decreeing toleration for all, he kept the pagan title of pontifex maximus, and continued through the greater part of his life to issue coins or medals on which he figured as the devotee of Apollo or Mars or Herakles or Mithra or Zeus.

While, however, he thus propitiated other Gods and worshippers, he gave the Christians from the first a unique financial support. Formerly, the clergy in general had been wont to supplement their monthly allowances by trading, farming, banking, by handicraft, and by practising as physicians; but the emperor now enacted that they should have regular annual allowances, and that the church's widows and virgins should be similarly supported. Further, not only did he restore the possessions taken from believers during the persecution, he enacted that all their priests, like those of Egypt and of the later empire in general, should be exempt from municipal burdens; a step as much to their interest as it was to the injury of the State and of all public spirit. The instant effect was to draw to the priesthood multitudes of gain-seekers; the churches of Carthage and Constantinople soon had 500 priests apiece; and so strong were the protests of the municipalities against the financial disorder he had created that Constantine was fain to restrict his decree. Certainly pagan flamens and public priests of the provinces, a restricted class, had had the same privilege, and this he maintained for them despite Christian appeals; nor does he seem to have withdrawn it from the priests and elders of the Jewish synagogues, who had also enjoyed it; but his direct gifts to the churches were considerable, and by permitting them to receive legacies in the manner of the pagan temples he established their financial basis. So great was their gain that laws had to be passed limiting the number of the clergy; and from this time forward laws were necessary to restrain priests and bishops from further enriching themselves by lending at interest.

Clerical power, however, was still further extended. Bishops, who had hitherto acted as arbitrators in Christian disputes, had their decisions legally enforced; and the important legal process of freeing slaves was transferred from the temples to the churches. Some pagan temples he temporarily suppressed, on moral grounds; some he allowed to be destroyed as no longer in use; but though he built and richly endowed several great Christian churches and passed some laws against pagan practices, he never ventured on the general persecution of pagans which his Christian hangers-on desired; and the assertions of Eusebius as to his having plundered the temples and brought paganism into contempt are among the many fictions--some of them perhaps later forgeries--in the works of that historian. As it was, Christian converts were sufficiently multiplied. Constantine's severest measures were taken against private divination, the practisers of which he ordered to be burnt alive; but here he acted on the standing principles of pagan law, and doubtless under the usual autocratic fear of soothsaying against himself. The measure of course had no effect on popular practice. The emperors themselves usually consulted diviners before their own accession; and their veto on divination for other people was thus not impressive.

It is in his relations to his chosen church, code, and creed that Constantine figures at his worst. In the year after his victory over Licinius, when he was ostensibly a doubly convinced Christian, he put to death his son Crispus, a nephew, and his wife, Fausta; and he had strangled Licinius and his son after promising to preserve their lives; but not a word of censure came from the Christian clergy. At one stroke, their whole parade of superior morality was gone; and the Church thenceforth was to be in the main as zealous a sycophant of thrones as the priests of the past had ever been. Constantine lived without rebuke the ordinary life of autocrats; and by the admission of his episcopal panegyrist he was surrounded by worthless self-seekers, Christians all. Such as he was, however, Constantine was joyfully accepted as head of the Church on earth. His creation of the new capital, Constantinople, was regarded as the beginning of a new era, that of Christianity; since the upper classes of Rome were the most zealous devotees of the old Gods, and were said to have received Constantine on his last visit with open disrespect. Remaining pontifex maximus, he presided over the OEcumenical Council of the Church; and one of the abuses he established was to put the entire imperial postal service, with its relays of horses and chariots, at the service of the bishops travelling to attend them. For all his efforts he had the reward of seeing them quarrel more and more furiously over their central dogmas and over questions of discipline. Under his eyes there arose the great schism of Arius, and the schism of the Donatists in Africa, both destined to deepen and worsen for many generations. The failure of the Church as a means of moral union becomes obvious once for all as soon as the act of establishment has removed the only previous restraining force on Christian quarrels, fear of the pagan enemy. Clerical revenues being mostly local, schism was still no economic disadvantage to any sectary; and the Christian creed availed as little to overrule primary instincts of strife as to provide rational tests for opinion or action.

It would seem as if whatever mental impulse was left in men must needs run in the new channels opened up for ignorant energy by ecclesiasticism and theology in that world of deepening ignorance and waning civilization. Literature as such was vanishing; art was growing more impotent reign by reign; and the physical sciences, revived for a time in their refuge at Alexandria by the Antonines and Flavians, were being lost from the hands of the living. To attribute the universal decadence to Christianity would be no less an error than the old falsism that it was a force of moral and civic regeneration: it was an effect rather than a cause of the general lapse. But, once established as part of the imperial machinery, it hastened every process of intellectual decay; and under such circumstances moral gain could not be. A doctrine of blind faith could not conceivably save a world sinking through sheer lack of light.

To Constantine, the endless strifes of the clergy over their creeds were as unintelligible as they were insoluble. Like the centurion of the gospel story, wont to command and to be obeyed, he looked for discipline in divine things; and as the theological feud became more and more embroiled he passed from uneasiness to a state between fear and rage. The Divinitas, he protested, would be turned against all, clergy and emperor and laity alike, if the clergy would not live at peace; and he quaintly besought them to leave points of theory alone, or else to imitate the pagan philosophers, who could debate without hatred. The ever-quarrelling Church was becoming a laughing-stock to the Pagans, being derided in the very theatres; and its new converts could be those only who went wherever there was chance of gain. So, in one of his rages, he decreed murderous punishment against intractable schismatics, only to find that the menace had multiplied the offence. Such as it was, however, the Church was an instrument of autocratic organization not to be dispensed with; and thus, at the stage at which its theological impulses, unchecked by sane moral feeling, would in the absence of persecution by the State have rent it in mutually destroying factions, the official protection of the State in turn came in to hold it together as a nominal unity. Thus and thus did the organism survive--by anything rather than moral vitality or intellectual virtue.

Leaving to the councils the settlement or unsettlement of dogmas, the emperor took upon himself, to the great satisfaction of the clergy, the whole external administration of the Church, assimilating it to his body politic. The four leading bishoprics--Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople--were put on a level with the four praetorian prefectures; under them were ecclesiastical exarchs, corresponding to the thirteen civil exarchs of given territories or dioceses; and next came metropolitans or archbishops who superintended the single provinces, 116 in all. In the next century, the Bishop of Jerusalem, formerly subject to Antioch, became independent; and those five sees became known as the five Patriarchates. Numbers of churches still remained for various reasons technically independent; but the natural effect of the whole system was to throw all authority upwards, the bishops overriding the presbyters, and all seeking to limit the power of the congregations to interfere. As the latter would now include an increasing number of indifferentists, the development was the more easy. On the side of external ceremony, always the gist of the matter for the majority, as well as in myth and theory, Christianity had now assimilated nearly every pagan attraction: baptism, as aforesaid, was become a close copy of an initiation into pagan mysteries, being celebrated twice a year by night with a blaze of lights; and when Constantine enacted that the Day of the Sun should be treated as specially holy, he was merely bracketing together pagan and Christian theology, the two sanctions being equally involved. It was of course not a sacred day in the modern Puritan sense, being simply put on a level with the other great festival days of the State, on which no work was done, but play was free.

It was in the year after his attainment of the sole power that Constantine summoned a General Council at his palace of Nicaea in Bithynia , to settle the theological status of the founder of the Church. The question had been ostensibly decided as against Paul of Samosata and the Sabellians by the dictum that they were different persons. That was for the time orthodox dogma. When, however, Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, declared as against his bishop that "the Son is totally and essentially distinct from the Father," the trouble began afresh. Arius found many adherents, who accused the bishop of Sabellianizing when he affirmed that the Son and the Father were of the same essence; and the Church saw itself once more driven to define its God. Bishop Alexander had Arius cast out of the Church by two Alexandrian Councils, with the effect of driving him to a more zealous propaganda, which succeeded as promptly and as widely as any previous heresy. Thereupon the Council of Nicaea, by a majority vote, enacted that the Son was of the same essence with the Father, yet a different person, and one-with yet born-of the Father; a creed to that effect was framed; Arius was sent into exile; and the leading bishops on his side were deposed. It was a mere snatch vote by a packed jury, since only some 300 bishops were present, whereas the Church contained at least 1,800; and five years afterwards Constantine, who on his own part had ordered that the writings of Arius should be burned, yet expressed himself as an ultra-Arian, became persuaded that the heresiarch had been ill-used, and recalled him from exile. Thereupon the restored Arian bishops began to persecute their persecutors; and Athanasius the new bishop of Alexandria having refused to reinstate Arius, he in turn was deprived of his office by the Council of Tyre and banished to Gaul, other depositions following; while a large council held at Jerusalem formally restored the Arians; and the emperor commanded the bishop of Constantinople to receive the heresiarch. Before this could be done, however, Arius died at Constantinople , apparently by poison, and Constantine died the year after, baptized by an Arian bishop, leaving the two parties at grips for their long wrestle of hate. Within a few years, the emperor's son Constans was threatening to make war on his brother Constantine if he did not reinstate Athanasius.

No more insane quarrel had ever convulsed any society. As an ecclesiastical historian has remarked, both parties believed in salvation through the blood of Jesus: on this primitive dogma, inherited from prehistoric barbarism, there was no dispute: and the battle was over the hopeful point of "assigning him that rank in the universe which properly belonged to him." Orthodoxy would have it that the Son was Son from all eternity--exactly, once more, as devout Brahmans and Moslems have maintained that the Vedas and the Koran were "uncreated," and existed from all eternity. Man's instinct of reverence seems to lead mechanically to such conceptions in the absence of critical thought. But the thought, on the other side, which made Jesus a God born in time, and homoiousios with the Father, was only relatively saner. Thus the Arians, rational in one aspect, took their stand on a fundamental irrationality; while the Trinitarians, as represented by Athanasius, found a sufficient substitute for argument in boundless vituperation. The fact that the Arians opposed monasticism and the ideal of perpetual virginity served to heighten orthodox resentment. The hatred was beyond all measure, and can be accounted for only by recognizing that a creed which appeals to emotion and degrades reason is potentially the worst stimulant of evil passions. On the intellectual side, if it can be said to have had one, the theory of the Trinity was a simple appropriation by Christianity of the conception of divine Triads which prevailed in the old Egyptian and other systems; and of which the Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus was a well-known instance. Athanasius was but adding Christian passion to yet another pagan theorem, assimilated on Gnostic lines, with a new stress laid on the verbal affirmation of monotheism.

The one quasi-rational argument applicable to the case would be the non-moral one that the cult was visibly between the Scylla of polytheism and the Charybdis of a monotheism which reduced Jesus to mere manhood; and that if a nakedly self-contradictory formula could preserve it from collapse on either side such a formula should be enacted. Such an argument was of course not put forward, but probably it appealed to some of the shrewder and less honest bishops, who in the ensuing strifes would nevertheless adapt themselves to the political urgency of the moment. The State had happily created a species of official pale, within which the warring members remained nominally one church. Within that superficies the chaos became indescribable. The Arians in their turn broke up into half-a-dozen mutually anathematizing sects, each brandishing a creed; and every new phase of heresy evoked orthodox rejoinders which in turn were found to be heresies in the other direction. On the first series of strifes followed a second, as to the manner of the combination of the divine and human natures in Jesus; with yet a third, over the personality or modality of the Holy Ghost; till theology had become a kind of systematic insanity.

While Egypt and the East were thus embroiled, northern Africa, "orthodox" on the Trinity, was being given up to the schism of the Donatists, one of the many outbreaks of the Puritan or ascetic instinct there, where of old had flourished some of the most sensual worships. The quarrel began over the election of a bishop of Carthage, and the puritan side received its title from one or both of two bishops named Donatus. Council after council failed to compose the feud; and the emperor fared no better when he took from the schismatics some of their temples, banished some of their bishops, and put numbers to death. In the year 330 one of their councils numbered 270 bishops; and still the schism went on growing. Any sect, it was clear, might grow as the Jesuist sect itself had done. Alongside of the others now arose yet a new movement, named after its semi-legendary founder, Manichaeus or Manes, a Persian, which combined in Gnostic fashion the Christian scheme and that of Mazdean dualism, identifying Jesus with Mithra; and this cult in turn, being carefully organized, spread fast and far, flourishing all the more because Manes was believed to have been put to death by the Persian king as a heretic to Mazdeism . It had a president, representing Christ; twelve masters, representing the twelve apostles; and seventy-two bishops, representing the seventy-two apostles of the third gospel or the seventy-two travelling collectors of the Jewish patriarchs. Like most of the earlier Gnostics the Manichaeans were "Docetists," holding that Jesus had only a seeming body and could not really suffer; and they not only denounced the Old Testament, calling Jehovah the Evil Spirit, but rejected the four gospels in favour of a new one, called Erteng, which Manes claimed to have been dictated to him by God. Improving on Montanus, he claimed, or was made to claim, to be the promised Paraclete; thus beginning a new creed on all fours with the Christist. On the side of ethics the new cult extolled and professed all the ascetic virtues, and held by a theory of a twofold purgatory, one of sacred water in the moon, and one of sacred fire in the sun, which burned away the impure body, leaving an immortal spirit. Giving out its independent gospel, Manichaeism had all the popular vitality of Montanism with the intellectual pretensions of Gnosticism. Nothing, it was clear, could hinder the creation of new sects out of or alongside the main body; and nothing but the most systematic and destructive persecution could prevent their separate continuance while zeal subsisted.

Under the family of Constantine his creed and his policy were maintained, with no better fruits under either the personal or the political aspect. To his three sons--Constantine II, Constantius, and Constans--with two of his nephews, he left the empire; but immediately the nephews were massacred with their fathers; of the three sons the second destroyed the first in war ; and the third, succeeding to the western provinces of the first, fell in war with a new competitor, Magnentius ; whereafter Constantius, defeating the latter by deputy, became sole emperor . To him appears to be chargeable the deliberate assassination at one stroke of the two surviving brothers of his father and all their sons save two, Gallus and Julian, the sons of Julius Constans; and at his hands began at least the theoretical persecution of paganism on the eager pressure of the church which forty years before had been persecuted. It thus remains matter of history that while many pagans had been in favour of tolerance before the establishment of Christianity, the Christians, who had naturally condemned all persecution while they suffered from it, were ready to become zealous persecutors as soon as they had the power. The treatise of Julius Firmicus Maternus on pagan errors is an eager appeal to the sons of Constantine to destroy all pagan worships. In point of fact, pagans were not the first to suffer. Excommunications, banishments, and executions of schismatics had been among the first fruits of Constantine's headship; and though for a time many recoiled from putting to death their heretical fellow-Christians, within a century that scruple too had disappeared. Thus again was "the Church" enabled to survive.

Christian persecution of paganism, on the other hand, did not take effect as promptly as its instigators would seem to have wished. In 341, Constans made an absurd law that "superstition should cease, and the madness of sacrifices be abolished," on pain of death to all who persisted. No official action seems to have been taken under this decree; and next year, being doubtless forced to respect the pagan party, he enacted that though superstition must be suppressed the old temples should be spared. In 353, Constantius in turn appears from the Theodosian Code to have decreed that all temples throughout the empire should be closed; that all who resorted to them or offered sacrifice should be put to death, and their property confiscated; and that governors who did not enforce the law should themselves be so punished. In the same year he ostensibly struck at nocturnal pagan rites at Rome, where Christian rites had so long been nocturnal. Three years later, when Julian had become Caesar under him, he framed a law, signed by both, which in a few words reaffirms the death penalty on all who sacrificed, or worshipped idols--this when some Christians were already worshipping idols in their churches. As there is no trace whatever of any official action being taken under these laws, and as there is abundant monumental proof that at least in the western empire and in Egypt the pagan worships were carried on freely as before, we are forced to conclude that the edicts, if really penned, were never given out by Constantius. It remains on record that he, keeping the pagan title of pontifex maximus, passed stringent laws, as Constans had done, against all who desecrated pagan tombs; and further that he went on paying the stipends of flamens, augurs, and vestals--personages usually of high rank. It appears that in fact the autocrat could not or dared not yet enforce his laws against the pagan worships. In the East in general, however, and even in Italy, wherever temples were unfrequented and ill defended they were liable to shameless plunder or destruction by Christians, who were safe from punishment.

On the other hand, Constantius multiplied the financial privileges of Christians, giving higher stipends to the clergy and doles of corn to the congregations. He maintained, too, an enormous retinue of vicious Christian parasites, the whole process worsening the already desperate public burdens, and straining to the utmost a financial system approaching the point of collapse. As head of the Church, he presided at Councils; and as a semi-Arian he encouraged Arianism and persecuted Athanasianism, the orthodox not daring openly to gainsay him. As little did either party condemn him when he brutally murdered the young Gallus, the Christian brother of Julian, leaving only the latter alive of all Constantine's house. To the bishops assembled in council he announced that his will was as good as a canon; and he forbade them to condemn opinions which he held. One bishop he caused to be tortured; others to be banished; one he put to death; and he would doubtless have slain Athanasius had not that great agitator been so well concealed by the monks of Egypt. Under the emperor's pressure the council of Rimini declared for Arianism; and for himself he framed the new title "His Eternity," calling himself the lord of the universe. Only the favour of the empress, and the emperor's own fears, saved Julian from his brother's fate, as his death seems to have been planned.

The Church was worthy of its head. "At each episcopal election or expulsion," says an orthodox writer, "the most exalted sees of Christendom--Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch--furnished scenes that would have disgraced a revolution." Julian has told how whole troops of those who were called heretics were massacred, notably at Cyzicus and at Samosata; while in Paphlagonia, Bithynia, Galatia, and many other provinces, towns and villages were utterly destroyed. In one massacre at Constantinople, the second in connection with the forcible re-instalment of the semi-Arian bishop Macedonius , there perished more than three thousand people--considerably more than had suffered death in the whole ten years of the last pagan persecution. The orthodox populace, divided in furious factions, fighting like savages in their very churches, were as brutal as their masters; and no priesthood was ever more powerless for good than the Christian clergy in face of these horrors. Gregory of Nazianzun, whose own ferocities of utterance illustrate the character of the period, declared truly that he had never seen a synod do aught but worsen a quarrel. Such was Christianity under the first Christian-bred emperor. And if Tiridates of Armenia be taken as the first Christian king, the beginnings of State Christianity are not greatly improved, since there the new faith was spread by fire and sword, and the old persecuted unremittingly for a hundred years, during which time raged many wars of religion between Armenia and Persia. The new faith had "come not to bring peace."

? 3. Reaction under Julian

Julian, a wistful child, saved from the massacre of his house, and growing up in a library whose lore there was no man competent to comment for him, became finally a believer in every religion save the one which sought to exterminate the rest. Steeped in theosophies, he was capable of exulting in the disappearance of the Epicureans, the sanest because the least credulous of the philosophic sects. Yet the lore he loved, such as it was, had sufficed to make him or keep him a model of temperance and self-control; chaste and abstemious while master of the world; just and magnanimous under provocations which, if he would, he could have met by wholesale slaughter; caring above all for the inner life while wielding capably the whole armed power of the State. If we talk of moral success, it must still be said that Christianity never gave any section of the Roman Empire a ruler worthy to stand by Marcus and Julian; and that on all the thrones of the world to-day there is no man who can be put above them for moral nobility. If, again, we keep our eyes on the age of Constantine, we cannot but be struck by the fact that Constantius "the pale," the father of Constantine, a monotheist but not a Christian, and Julian, who turned away from Christianity to polytheism, are by far the best men in the series of rulers of that house. Christianity attracted the worse men, Constantine and his sons, and repelled or failed to satisfy the better; and the younger Constantius, who was bred and remained a Christian, is the worst of all. The finer character-values are all associated with paganism: on the Christian side there is a signal defect of good men.

It has been questioned whether the eagerness of Julian's desire to discredit Christism would not have made him a persecutor had he lived longer; and such a development is indeed conceivable. His zeal was such that with all the load of empire and generalship on his shoulders he found time in his short reign to write a long treatise against the Christian books and the creed, of which his full knowledge and excellent memory made him a formidable critic; and his tone towards Athanasius seems to have grown more and more bitter. It is hard for the master of thirty legions to tolerate opposition and to remain righteous. On the other hand, Julian gave proofs not only of an abnormal self-restraint, but of an exceptional judgment in things purely political; and the very fact that his young enthusiasm had led him astray, making him hope for a vital restoration of paganism out of hand, would probably with such a mind have counted for caution after the lesson had been learned. Falling in battle with the Persians after only twenty months of full power, he had no time to readjust himself to the forces of things as experience disclosed them to him: he had time only to feel disappointment. Had he lived to form his own judgment instead of merely assimilating the ideas of his Neo-Platonic teachers he would be in a fair way to frame a better philosophy of life than either the polytheistic or the Christian. Such a philosophy had been left by Epictetus, to name no other; and Julian's passion for rites and sacrifices was really a falling below pagan wisdom and ethics current in his time, as his facile belief in myths was a falling below the pagan rationalism set forth a little later by Macrobius, and not unknown in Julian's day. No less unworthy of the best pagan thought was his affectation of cynic uncleanliness--an inverted foppery likely to have passed with youth. A few years must have taught him that men were not to be regenerated by pagan creeds any more than by Christian; and to his laws for the reform of administration he might have added some for the reform of culture. Dying in his prime, he has formed a text for much Christian rhetoric to the effect that he had dreamed a vain dream. Insofar, however, as that rhetoric assumes the indestructibility of the Christian Church at the hands of pagan emperors, it is no sounder than the most sanguine hopes of Julian.

To say that Julian had hopelessly miscalculated the possibilities of paganism is to misconceive the whole sociological case if it be implied that Christianity survived in virtue of its dogma or doctrine, and that it was on the side of dogma or morality that paganism failed. As a regenerating force Christianity was as impotent as any pagan creed: it was indeed much less efficacious than one pagan philosophy had been, and had visibly set up in the State new ferocities of civil strife. Under the two Antonines, Stoic principles had governed the empire so well, relatively to the possibilities of the system, that many modern historians have been fain to reckon theirs the high-water mark of all European administration. No such level was ever reached in the Christian empire, from Constantine onwards. Julian himself schemed more solid reforms of administration in his one year of rule than any of his Christian successors ever accomplished, with the exceptions of Marcian and Anastasius; and could he have foreseen how the empire was to go in Christian hands he would certainly have had no reason to alter his course. To take the mere actual continuance of Christianity as a proof of its containing more truth or virtue than the whole of paganism is to confuse biological survival with moral merit. "The survival of the fittest," a principle which holds good of every aspect of Nature, is not a formula of moral discrimination, but a simple summary of evolution. The camel which survives in a waterless desert is not thereby proved a nobler animal than the horse or elephant which perishes there. Christianity, as we have seen, while utterly failing among the Jews, where it had birth, had subsisted from the first in the pagan world through adopting the attractive features of paganism, and because of its politico-economical adaptations. Paganism--official paganism, that is--disappeared as an institution because such adaptations were not given to it.

Nor is it reasonable to say that Julian's undertaking was impossible. His plans were indeed those of an inexperienced enthusiast; but had he lived as long as Constantine, and learned by experience, he might have witnessed his substantial success; and a century of intelligently continuous policy to the same end might have expelled Christianity as completely from the Roman world as Buddhism was soon to be expelled from India. No one who has studied the latter phenomenon can use the language commonly held of the attempt of Julian. Buddhism, representing at least as high a moral impetus as that of Christism, had arisen and nourished greatly in direct opposition to Brahmanism; after centuries of success it is found assimilating all the popular superstitions on which Brahmanism lived, even as Christianity assimilated those of paganism; and it was either by assimilating elements of Buddhism on that plane or by such policy joined with coercive force that the Brahmans finally eliminated it from their sphere. Had a succession of Roman emperors set themselves to create a priestly organization of pagan cults, with as good an economic basis as that of Brahmanism, or as that of Judaism was even after the fall of the Temple, they could have created a force which might triumph over the new cult in its own sphere even as Brahmanism and Judaism did. And if at the same time they had left the Church severely alone, allowing its perpetual strifes to do their own work, it would inevitably have dissolved itself by sheer fission into a hundred mutually menacing factions, an easy foe for a coherent paganism. Mere spasmodic persecution had previously failed, for it is not random persecution that kills creeds, though a really relentless and enduring persecution can do much. In the period from 330 to 370, and again in the sixth century, the Persian kings did actually, by sheer bloodshed, so far crush orthodox Christianity in their kingdom that it ceased to have any importance there--a circumstance little noted by those who dwell on its "success" in Europe. And the same Sassanide dynasty, beginning in the middle of the third century, effected the systematic revival of the Mazdean religion, which before had seemed corrupted and discredited past remedy.

Had Julian lived to learn in Persia the methods so successfully used by Ardeshir, he might no less successfully have copied them. Only an idealist like Julian, of course, would have thought the effort on peaceful lines worth while. A much abler and better man than Jovian would reasonably decide in his place that the religion of Mithra, having come from the now triumphant Persian enemy, could hardly continue to be that of the Roman army; and that the most politic course was to revert to the cult which Julian had opposed, and whose champions saw in his death the hand of their God working for them. Nonetheless, the common verdict on Julian as the victim of a hopeless delusion is hardly better founded than the gross fable that on receiving his death-wound he cried, "Thou hast conquered, Galilean." The Christians, indeed, might well exult and fabulize over his death. It probably made all the difference between prosperity and collapse for their creed, already riven in irreconcilable factions, and capable of a general cohesion only through the coercive power of the State.

? 4. Re-establishment: Disestablishment of Paganism

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet