SILANUS THE CHRISTIAN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

CLUE: A Guide through Greek to Hebrew Scripture (Diatessarica—Part I).

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THE CORRECTIONS OF MARK (Diatessarica—Part II).

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FROM LETTER TO SPIRIT (Diatessarica—Part III).

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PARADOSIS (Diatessarica—Part IV).

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AGENTS

SILANUS
THE CHRISTIAN

BY

EDWIN A. ABBOTT
AUTHOR OF “PHILOCHRISTUS” AND “ONESIMUS”

“The love of Christ constraineth us.”
2 Cor. v. 14.

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1906

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

TO THE MEMORY
OF
EPICTETUS
NOT A CHRISTIAN
BUT AN AWAKENER OF ASPIRATIONS
THAT COULD NOT BE SATISFIED
EXCEPT IN CHRIST

PREFACE

Many years have elapsed since the author was constrained (not by a priori considerations but by historical and critical evidence) to disbelieve in the miraculous element of the Bible. Yet he retained the belief of his childhood and youth—rooted more firmly than before—in the eternal unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in the supernatural but non-miraculous incarnation of the Son as Jesus Christ, and in Christ’s supernatural but non-miraculous resurrection after He had offered Himself up as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

The belief is commonly supposed to be rendered impossible by the disbelief. This book is written to shew that there is no such impossibility.

The vast majority of the worshippers of Christ base their worship to a very large extent—as the author did in his early youth under the cloud of Paley’s Evidences—on their acceptance of His miracles as historical facts. In the author’s opinion this basis is already demonstrably unsafe, and may be at any moment, by some new demonstration, absolutely destroyed.

Nevertheless such worshippers, if their worship is really genuine—that is to say, if it includes love, trust, and awe, carried to their highest limits, and not merely that kind of awe which is inspired by “mighty works”—will do well to avoid this book. If doubt has not attacked them, why should they go to meet it? In pulling up falsehood by the roots there is always a danger of uprooting or loosening a truth that grows beside it. Historical error, if honest, is better (and less misleading) than spiritual darkness. For example, it is much better (and less misleading) to remain in the old-fashioned belief that a good and wise God created the world in six days than to adopt a new belief that a bad or unwise or careless God—or a chance, or a force, or a power—evolved it in sixty times six sextillions of centuries.

To such genuine worshippers of Christ, then, as long as they feel safe and sincere in their convictions, this book is not addressed. They are (in the author’s view) substantially right, and had better remain as they are.

But there may be some, calling themselves worshippers of Christ, who cannot honestly say that they love Him. They trust His power, they bow before Him as divine; but they have no affection at all for Him, as man, or as God. What St Paul described as the “constraining” love of Christ has never touched them. And yet they fancy they worship! To them this book may be of use in suggesting the divinity and loveableness of Christ’s human nature; and any harm the book might do them can hardly be conceived as equal to the harm of remaining in their present position. One may learn Christ by rote, as one may learn Euclid by rote, so as to be almost ruined for really knowing either. For such learners the best course may be to go back and begin again.

It is, however, to a third class of readers that the author mainly addresses himself. Having in view the experiences of his own early manhood, he regards with a strong fellow feeling those who desire to worship Christ and to be loyal and faithful to Him, if only they can at the same time be loyal and faithful to truth, and who doubt the compatibility of the double allegiance.

These, many of them, cannot even conceive how they can worship Christ at the right hand of God, or the Son in the bosom of the Father in heaven, unless they first believe in Him as miraculously manifested on earth. Not being able to accept Him as miraculous, they reject Him as a Saviour. To them this book specially appeals, endeavouring to shew, in a general and popular way—on psychological, historical, and critical grounds—how the rejection of the claim made by most Christians that their Lord is miraculous, may be compatible with a frank and full acceptance of the conclusion that He is, in the highest sense, divine.

Detailed proofs this volume does not offer. These will be given in a separate volume of “Notes,” shortly to be published. This will be of a technical nature, forming Part VII of the series called Diatessarica. The present work merely aims at suggesting such conceptions of history, literature, worship, human nature, and divine Being, as point to a foreordained conformation of man to God, to be fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ, of which the fulfilment may be traced in the Christian writings and the Christian churches of the first and second centuries.

It also attempts, in a manner not perhaps very usual, to meet many objections brought against Christianity by those who assert that its records are inadequate, inaccurate, and contradictory. Instead of denying these defects, the author admits and emphasizes them as being inseparable from earthen vessels containing a spiritual treasure, and as (in some cases) indirectly testifying to the divinity of the Person whom the best efforts of the best and most inspired of the evangelists inadequately, though honestly, portray. Specimens of these defects are freely given, shewing the modifications, amplifications, and (in some case) misinterpretations or corruptions, to which Christian tradition was inevitably exposed in passing from the east to the west during a period of about one hundred and thirty years, dating from the Crucifixion.

These objects the author has endeavoured to attain by sketching an autobiography of an imaginary character, by name Quintus Junius Silanus, who in the second year of Hadrian (A.D. 118) becomes a hearer of Epictetus and a Christian convert, and commits his experiences to paper forty-five years afterwards in the second year of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Verus (A.D. 163).

EDWIN A. ABBOTT.

Wellside, Well Walk,
Hampstead.
28 Aug. 1906.

SUMMARY

Quintus Junius Silanus, born 90 A.D., goes from Rome at the suggestion of his old friend Marcus Æmilius Scaurus, to attend the lectures of Epictetus in Nicopolis about 118 A.D.

Scaurus (like Silanus, an imaginary character) born about 50 A.D., is a disabled soldier, and has been for many years a student of miscellaneous Greek literature, including Christian writings. In reply to a letter from Silanus, extolling his new teacher, Scaurus expresses his belief that Epictetus has passed through a stage of infection with “the Christian superstition,” from which he has borrowed some parts of the superstructure while rejecting its foundation.

Silanus, in order to defend his teacher Epictetus from what he considers an unjust imputation, procures the epistles of Paul. His interest in these leads him to the “scriptures” from which Paul quotes. Thence he is led on to speculate about the nature of the “gospel” preached by Paul, and about the character and utterances of the “Christ” from whom that “gospel” originated. The epistles convey to him a sense of spiritual strength and “constraining love.” He determines to procure the Christian gospels.

During all this time he is occasionally corresponding with Scaurus and attending the lectures of Epictetus, which satisfy him less and less. Contrasted with the spiritual strength in the epistles of Paul the lectures seem to contain only spiritual effervescence. And there is an utter absence of “constraining love.”

When the three Synoptic gospels reach Silanus from Rome, he receives at the same time a destructive criticism on them from Scaurus. Much of this criticism he is enabled to meet with the aid of the Pauline epistles. But enough remains to shake his faith in their historical accuracy. Nor does he find in them the same presence that he found in the epistles, of “constraining love.” The result is, that he is thrown back from Christ.

At this crisis he meets Clemens, an Athenian, who lends him a gospel that has recently appeared, the gospel of John. Clemens frankly admits his doubts about its authorship, and about its complete accuracy, but commends it as conveying the infinite spiritual revelation inherent in Christ less inadequately than it is conveyed by the Synoptists.

A somewhat similar view is expressed by Scaurus, though with a large admixture of hostile criticism. He has recently received the fourth gospel, and it forms the subject of his last letter. While rejecting much of it as unhistorical, he expresses great admiration for it, and for what he deems its fundamental principle, namely, that Jesus cannot be understood save through a “disciple whom Jesus loved.”

While speculating on what might have happened if he himself had come under the influence of a “disciple whom Jesus loved,” Scaurus is struck down by paralysis. Silanus sets sail for Italy in the hope of finding his friend still living. At the moment when he is losing sight of the hills above Nicopolis where Clemens is praying for him, Silanus receives an apprehension of Christ’s “constraining love” and becomes a Christian.

No attempt has been made to give the impression of an archaic or Latin style. Hence “Christus” and “Paulus” are mostly avoided except in a few instances where they are mentioned for the first time by persons speaking from a non-Christian point of view. Similar apparent inconsistencies will be found in the use of “He” and “he,” denoting Christ. The use varies, partly according to the speaker, partly according to the speaker’s mood. It varies also in quotations from scripture according to the extent to which the Revised Version is followed.

The utterances assigned to Epictetus are taken from the records of his sayings by Arrian or others. Some of these have been freely translated, paraphrased, and transposed; but none of them are imaginary. When Silanus says that his friend Arrian “never heard Epictetus say” this or that, the meaning is that the expression does not occur in Epictetus’s extant works, so far as can be judged from Schenkl’s admirable Index.

The words assigned to Arrian, Silanus’s friend, when speaking in his own person, are entirely imaginary; but the statements made about Arrian’s birthplace and official career are based on history.

Any words assigned by Scaurus to his “friend” Pliny, Plutarch, or Josephus, or by Silanus to “the young Irenæus,” or Justin, may be taken to be historical. The references will be given in the volume of Notes.

Scaurus and Silanus occasionally describe themselves as “finding marginal notes” indicating variations in their MSS. of the gospels. In all such cases the imaginary “marginal notes” are based on actual various readings or interpolations which will be given in the volume of Notes. Most of these are of an early date, and may be based on much earlier originals; and care has been taken to exclude any that are of late origin. But the reader must bear in mind that we have no MSS. of the gospels, and therefore no “marginal notes,” of so early a date as 118 A.D.

CONTENTS

ERRATA.

Transcriber’s Note: the errata have been corrected.

CHAPTER I
THE FIRST LECTURE

“I forbid you to go into the senate-house.” “As long as I am a senator, go I must.” Two voices were speaking from one person—the first, pompous, coarse, despotic; the second, refined, dry, austere. There was nothing that approached stage-acting—only a suggestion of one man swelling out with authority, and of another straightening up his back in resistance. These were the first words that I heard from Epictetus, as I crept late into the lecture-room, tired with a long journey over-night into Nicopolis.

I need not have feared to attract attention. All eyes were fixed on the lecturer as I stole into a place near the door, next my friend Arrian, who was absorbed in his notes. What was it all about? In answer to my look of inquiry Arrian pushed me his last sheet with the names “Vespasian” and “Helvidius Priscus” scrawled large upon it. Then I knew what it meant. It was a story now nearly forty years old—which I had often heard from my father’s old friend, Æmilius Scaurus—illustrating the duty of obeying the voice of the conscience rather than the voice of a king. Epictetus, after his manner, was throwing it into the form of a dialogue:—

“Vespasian. I forbid you to go into the senate-house.

“Priscus. As long as I am a senator, go I must.

“Vespasian. Go, then, but be silent.

“Priscus. Do not ask my opinion, and I will be silent.

“Vespasian. But I am bound to ask it.

“Priscus. And I am bound to answer, and to answer what I think right.

“Vespasian. Then I shall kill you.

“Priscus. Did I ever say that I could not be killed? It is yours to kill; mine, to die fearless.”

I give his words almost as fully as Arrian took them down. But his tone and spirit are past man’s power to put on paper. He flashed from Emperor to Senator like the zig-zag of lightning with a straight down flash at the end. This was always his way. He would play a thousand parts, seeming, superficially, a very Proteus; but they were all types of two characters, the philosopher and the worldling, the follower of the Logos and the follower of the flesh. Moreover, he was always in earnest, in hot earnest. On the surface he would jest like Menander or jibe like Aristophanes; but at bottom he was a tragedian. At one moment he would point to his halting leg and flout himself as a lame old grey-beard with a body of clay. In the next, he was “a son of Zeus,” or “God’s own son,” or “carrying about God.” Never at rest, he might deceive a stranger into supposing that he was occasionally rippling and sparkling with real mirth like a sea in sunlight. But it was never so. It was a sea of molten metal and there was always a Vesuvius down below.

I suspect that he never knew mirth or genial laughter even as a child. He was born a slave, his master being Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero’s and his favourite, afterwards killed by Domitian. I have heard—but not from Arrian—that this master caused his lameness. He was twisting his leg one day to see how much he could bear. The boy—for he was no more—said with a smile, “If you go on, you will break it,” and then, “Did not I tell you, you would break it?” True or false, this story gives the boy as I knew the man. You might break his leg but never his will. I do not know whether Epaphroditus, out of remorse, had him taught philosophy; but taught he was, under one of the best men of the day, and he acquired such fame that he was banished from Rome under Domitian, with other philosophers of note—whether at or before the time when Domitian put Epaphroditus to death I cannot say. In one of his lectures he described how he was summoned before the Prefect of the City with the other philosophers: “Come,” said the Prefect, “come, Epictetus, shave off your beard.” “If I am a philosopher,” he replied, “I am not going to shave it off.” “Then I shall take your head off.” “If it is for your advantage, take it off.”

But now to return to my first lecture. Among our audience were several men of position and one at least of senatorial rank. Some of them seemed a little scandalized at the Teacher’s dialogue. It was not likely that the Emperor would take offence, for in the second year of Hadrian we were not in a Neronian or Domitian atmosphere; moreover, our Teacher was known to be on good terms with the new Emperor. But perhaps their official sense of propriety was shocked; and, in the first sentence of what follows, Epictetus may have been expressing their thoughts: “‘So you, philosophers, teach people to despise the throne!’ Heaven forbid! Which of us teaches anyone to lay claim to anything over which kings have authority? Take my body, take my goods, take my reputation! Take my friends and relations! ‘Yes,’ says the ruler, ‘but I must also be ruler over your convictions.’ Indeed, and who gave you this authority?”

Epictetus went on to say that if indeed his pupils were of the true philosophic stamp, holding themselves detached from the things of the body and with their minds fixed on the freedom of the soul, he would have no need to spur them to boldness, but rather to draw them back from over-hasty rushing to the grave; for, said he, they would come flocking about him, begging and praying to be allowed to teach the tyrant that they were free, by finding freedom at once in self-inflicted death: “Here on earth, Master, these robbers and thieves, these courts of justice and kings, have the upper hand. These creatures fancy that they have some sort of authority over us, simply because they have a hold on our paltry flesh and its possessions! Suffer us, Master, to shew them that they have authority over nothing!” If, said he, a pupil of this high spirit were brought before the tribunal of one of the rulers of the earth, he would come back scoffing at such “authority” as a mere scarecrow: “Why all these preparations, to meet no enemy at all? The pomp of his authority, his solemn anteroom, his gentlemen of the chamber, his yeomen of the guard—did they all come to no more than this! These things were nothing, and I was preparing to meet something great!”

On the scholar of the unpractical and cowardly type, anxiously preparing “what to say” in his defence before the magistrate’s tribunal, he poured hot scorn. Had not the fellow, he asked, been practising “what to say”—all his life through? “What else,” said he, “have you been practising? Syllogisms and convertible propositions!” Then came the reply, in a whine, “Yes, but he has authority to kill me!” To which the Teacher answered, “Then speak the truth, you pitiful creature. Cease your imposture and give up all claim to be a philosopher. In the lords of the earth recognise your own lords and masters. As long as you give them this grip on you, through your flesh, so long must you be at the beck and call of every one that is stronger than you are. Socrates and Diogenes had practised ‘what to say’ by the practice of their lives. But as for you—get you back to your own proper business, and never again budge from it! Back to your own snug corner, and sit there at your leisure, spinning your syllogisms:

‘In thee is not the stuff that makes a man

A people’s leader.’”

Thence he passed to the objection that a judicial condemnation might bring disgrace on a man’s good name. “The authorities, you say, have condemned you as guilty of impiety and profanity. What harm is there in that for you? This creature, with authority to condemn you—does he himself know even the meaning of piety or impiety? If a man in authority calls day night or bass treble, do men that know take notice of him? Unless the judge knows what the truth is, his ‘authority to judge’ is no authority. No man has authority over our convictions, our inmost thoughts, our will. Hence when Zeno the philosopher went into the presence of Antigonus the king, it was the king that was anxious, not the philosopher. The king wished to gain the philosopher’s good opinion, but the philosopher cared for nothing that the king could give. When, therefore, you go to the palace of a great ruler, remember that you are in effect going to the shop of a shoemaker or a grocer—on a great scale of course, but still a grocer. He cannot sell you anything real or lasting, though he may sell his groceries at a great price.”

At the bottom of all this doctrine about true and false authority, there was, as I afterwards understood, a belief that God had bestowed on all men, if they would but accept and use it, authority over their own wills, so that we might conform our wills to His, as children do with a Father, and might find pleasure, and indeed our only pleasure, in doing this—accepting all bodily pain and evil as not evil but good because it comes from His will, which must be also our will and must be honoured and obeyed. “When,” said he, “the ruler says to anyone, ‘I will fetter your leg,’ the man that is in the habit of honouring his leg cries, ‘Don’t, for pity’s sake!’ But the man that honours his will says, ‘If it appears advisable to you, fetter it’.”

“Tyrant. Won’t you bend?

“Cynic. I will not bend.

“Tyrant. I will show you that I am lord.

“Cynic. You! impossible! I have been freed by Zeus. Do you really imagine that He would allow His own son to be made a slave? But of my corpse you are lord. Take it.”

In this particular lecture Epictetus also gave us a glimpse of a wider and more divine authority imparted by God to a few special natures, akin to Himself, whereby, as God is supreme King over men His children, so a chosen few may become subordinate kings over men their brethren. Like Plato, he seemed to look forward to a time when rulers would become philosophers, or else philosophers kings. Nero and Sardanapalus, Agamemnon and Alexander, all came under his lash—all kings and rulers of the old régime. Not that he denied Agamemnon a superiority to Nero, or the right to call himself “shepherd of the people” if he pleased. “Sheep, indeed,” he exclaimed, “to submit to be ruled over by you!” and “Shepherd, indeed, for you weep like the shepherds, when a wolf has snatched away a sheep!”

From these old-fashioned rulers he passed to a new and nobler ideal of kingship: “Those kings and tyrants received from their armed guards the power of rebuking and punishing wrongdoing, though they might be rascals themselves. But on the Cynic”—that was the term he used—“this power is bestowed by the conscience.” Then he explained to us what he meant by “conscience”—the consciousness of a life of wise, watchful, and unwearied toil for man, with the co-operation of God. “And how,” he asked, “could such a man fail to be bold and speak the truth with boldness, speaking, as he does, to his own brethren, to his own children and kinsfolk? So inspired, he is no meddler or busybody. Supervising and inspecting the affairs of mankind, he is not busying himself with other men’s matters, but with his own. Else, call a general, too, a busybody, when he is busy inspecting his own soldiers!”

This was, to me, quite a new view of the character of a Cynic. But Epictetus insisted on it with reiteration. The Cynic, he said, was Warrior and Physician in one. As a warrior, he was like Hercules, wandering over the world with his club and destroying noxious beasts and monsters. As a physician, he was like Socrates or Diogenes, going about and doing good to those afflicted with sickness of mind, diagnosing each disease, prescribing diet, cautery, or other remedy. In both these capacities the Cynic received from God authority over men, and men recognised it in him, because they perceived him to be their benefactor and deliverer.

There are, said Epictetus, in each man two characters—the character of the Beast and the character of the Man. By Beast he meant wild or savage beast, as distinct from tame beast, which he preferred to call “sheep.” “Sheep” meant the cowardly, passive-greedy passions within us. “The Beast” meant the savage, aggressive-greedy nature, not only stirring us up to external war against our neighbours, but also waging war to the death against our inward better nature, against the “Man.” The mark or stamp of the Beast he connected with Nero. “Cast it away,” he said. The opposite mark or stamp he connected with the recently deceased Emperor, Trajan. If we acted like a beast, he warned us that we should become like a beast, and then, according to his customary phrase, “You will have lost the Man.” And was this, asked he, nothing to lose? Over and over again he repeated it: “You have thrown away the Man.” It was in this light—as a type of the Man—that he regarded Hercules, the first of the Cynics, the Son of God, going on the errands of the Father to destroy the Beast in its various shapes, typifying an armed Missionary, but armed for spiritual not for fleshly warfare, destroying the Beast that would fain dominate the world. But it was for Diogenes that he reserved his chief admiration, placing him (I think) even above Socrates, or at all events praising him more warmly—partly, perhaps, out of fellow-feeling, because Diogenes, too, like himself, had known what it was to be a slave. Never shall I forget the passage in this lecture in which he described Alexander surprising the great Cynic asleep, and waking him up with a line of Homer:—

“To sleep all night suits not a Councillor,”

—to which Diogenes replied at once in the following line, claiming for himself the heavy burden (entrusted to him by Zeus) of caring like a king for all the nations of the earth:—

“Who holds, in trust, the world’s vast orb of cares.”

Diogenes, according to our Teacher, was much more than an Æsculapius of souls; he was a sovereign with “the sceptre and the kingdom of the Cynic.” Some have represented Epictetus as claiming this authority for himself. But in the lecture that I heard, it was not so. Though what he said might have been mistaken as a claim for himself, it was really a claim for “the Cynic,” as follows. First he put the question, “How is it possible for one destitute, naked, homeless, hearthless, squalid, with not one slave to attend him, or a country to call his own, to lead a life of equable happiness?” To which he replied, “Behold, God hath sent unto you the man to demonstrate in act this possibility. ‘Look on me, and see that I am without country, home, possessions, slaves; no bed but the ground, no wife, no children—no palace to make a king or governor out of me—only the earth, and the sky, and one threadbare cloak! And yet what do I want? Am I not fearless? Am I not free? When saw ye me failing to find any good thing that I desired, or falling into any evil that I would fain have avoided? What fault found I ever with God or man? When did I ever accuse anyone? Did anyone ever see me with a gloomy face? How do I confront the great persons before whom you, worldlings, bow abashed and dismayed? Do not I treat them as cringing slaves? Who, that sees me, does not feel that he sees in me his natural Lord and Master?’”

I confess that up to this point I had myself supposed that he was speaking of himself, standing erect as ruler of the world. But in the next instant he had dropped, as it were, from the pillar upon which he had been setting up the King, and now, like a man at the pedestal pointing up to the statue on the top, he exclaimed, “Behold, these are the genuine Cynic’s utterances: this is his stamp and image: this is his aim!”

He passed on to answer the question, What if the Cynic missed his aim, or, at least, missed it so far as exerting the royal authority over others? What if death cut his purpose short? In that case, he said, the will, the purpose, the one essential good, had at all events remained in its purity; and how could man die better than in such actions? “If, while I am thus employed, death should overtake me, it will suffice me if I can lift up my hands to God and say, ‘The helps that I received from thee, to the intent that I might understand and follow thy ordering of the universe, these I have not neglected. I have not disgraced thee, so far as in me lay. See how I have used these faculties which thou hast given me! Have I ever found fault with thee? ever been ill-pleased with anything that has happened or ever wished it to happen otherwise? Thou didst beget me, and I thank thee for all thou gavest me. I have used to the full the gifts that were of thy giving and I am satisfied. Receive them back again and dispose them in such region as may please thee. Thine were they all, and thou hast given them unto me.’” Then, turning to us, he said, “Are you not content to take your exit after this fashion? Than such a life, what can be better, or more full of grace and beauty? Than such an end, what can be more full of blessing?”

There was much more, which I cannot recall. I was no longer in a mood to note and remember exact words and phrases, and I despair of making my readers understand why. Able philosophers and lecturers I had heard before, but none like this man. Some of those had moved me to esteem and gained my favourable judgement. But this man did more than “move” me. He whirled me away into an upper region of spiritual possibility, at once glad and sad—sad at what I was, glad at what I might be. Alcibiades says in the Symposium of Plato that whereas the orator Pericles had only moved his outer self to admiration, the teaching of Socrates caught hold of his very soul, “whirling it away into a Corybantic dance.” I quoted these words to Arrian as we left the lecture-room together, and he replied that they were just to the point. “Epictetus,” he said, “is by birth a Phrygian. And, like the Phrygian priests of Cybele, with their cymbals and their dances, he has just this power of whirling away his hearers into any region he pleases and making them feel at any moment what he wishes them to feel. But,” added he thoughtfully, “it did not last with Alcibiades. Will it last with us?”

I argued—or perhaps I should say protested—at considerable length, that it would last. Arrian walked on for a while without answering. Presently he said, “This is your first lecture. It is not so with me. I, as you know, have heard Epictetus for several months, and I admire him as much as you do, perhaps more. I am sure he is doing me good. But I do not aim at being his ideal Cynic. ‘In me is not the stuff’—I admit his censure—that makes a man into a King, bearing all the cares of all mankind upon his shoulders. My ambition is, some day, to become (as you are by birth) a Roman citizen”—he was not one then, nor was he Flavius Arrianus, but I have called him by the name by which he became known in the world—“and to do good work in the service of the Empire, as an officer of the State and yet an honest man. For that purpose I want to keep myself in order—at all events to some reasonable extent. Epictetus is helping me to do this, by making me ashamed of the foul life of the Beast, and by making me aspire to what he calls ‘the Man.’ That I feel day by day, and for that I am thankful.

“But if you ask me about the reality of this ‘authority,’ which our Teacher claims for his Cynic, then, in all honesty, I must confess to doubts. Socrates, certainly, has moved the minds of civilised mankind. But then he had, as you know, a ‘daemonic something’ in him, a divine voice of some kind. And he believed in the immortality of the soul—a point on which you have not yet heard what Epictetus has to say. As to Diogenes, though I have always faithfully recorded in my notes what our Teacher says about him, yet I do not feel that the philosopher of the tub had the same heaven-sent authority as Socrates, or as Epictetus himself. And, indeed, did you not yourself hear to-day that God gives us authority over nothing but our own hearts and wills? How, then, can the Cynic claim this authority over others, except as an accident? But I forget. Perhaps Epictetus did not mention to-day his usual doctrine about ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ about ‘peace of mind’ and about the ‘rule’ of our neighbours as being ‘no evil’ to us. It reappears in almost every lecture. Wait till you have heard this.

“Again, as to the origin of this authority, the Teacher tells us that it is given by God—or by Gods, for he uses both expressions. But by what God or Gods? Is not this a matter of great importance? Wait till you have heard him on this point. Now I must hasten back to my rooms to commit my notes to writing while fresh in my memory. We meet in the lecture-room to-morrow. Meantime, believe me, I most heartily sympathize with you in your admiration of one whom I account the best of all living philosophers. I have all your conviction of his sincerity. Assuredly, whencesoever he derives it, he has in him a marvellous power for good. The Gods grant that it may last!”

CHAPTER II
EPICTETUS ON THE GODS

Arrian was right in thinking that the next lecture would be on the Gods. I had come to Nicopolis at the end of one of the lecture-courses, and had heard its conclusion—the perfecting of the Cynic. The new course began by describing the purpose of God in making man.

But at the outset the subject was, not God, but the Logos—that word so untranslateable into our Latin, including as it does suggestions of our Word, Discourse, Reason, Logic, Understanding, Purpose, Proportion, and Harmony. Starting from this, Epictetus first said that the only faculty that could, as it were, behold itself, and theorize about itself, was the faculty of the Logos, which is also the faculty with which we regard, and, so to speak, mentally handle, all phenomena. From the Logos, or Word, he passed to God, as the Giver of this faculty: “It was therefore right and meet that this highest and best of all gifts should be the only one that the Gods have placed at our disposal. All the rest they have not placed at our disposal. Can it be that the Gods did not wish to place them in our power? For my part, I think that, if they had been able, they would have entrusted us also with the rest. But they were absolutely unable. For, being on earth, and bound up with such a body as this”—and here he made his usual gesture of self-contempt, mocking at his own lame figure—“how was it possible that we should not be prevented by these external fetters from receiving those other gifts? But what says Zeus?”—with that, the halting mortal, turning suddenly round, had become the Olympian Father addressing a child six years old: “Epictetus, if it had been practicable, I would have made your dear little body quite free, and your pretty little possessions quite free too, and quite at your disposal. But as it is, don’t shut your eyes to the truth. This little body is not your very own. It is only a neat arrangement in clay.”

After a pause, the Epictetian Zeus continued as follows, falling from “I” to “we.” Some of our fellow-scholars declared to Arrian after lecture that Epictetus could not have meant this change, and they slightly altered the words in their notes. I prefer to give the difficult words of Zeus as Arrian took them down and as I heard them: “But, since I was not able to do this, WE gave you a portion of OURSELVES, this power”—and here Epictetus made believe to put a little box into the child’s hand, adding that it contained a power of pursuing or avoiding, of liking or disliking—“Take care of this, and put in it all that belongs to you. As long as you do this, you will never be hindered or hampered, never cry, never scold, and never flatter.”

The change from I to WE was certainly curious; and some said that “we gave,” edōkamen, ought to be regarded as two words, edōka men, “I gave on the one hand.” But “on the one hand” made no sense. Nor could they themselves deny that Epictetus made Zeus say, first, “I was not able,” and then, “a part of ourselves.” I think the explanation may be this. Epictetus had many ways of looking at the Divine Nature. Sometimes he regarded it as One, sometimes as Many. When he thought of God as supporting and controlling the harmonious Cosmos, or Universe, then God was One—the Monarch or General to whom we all owed loyal obedience. Often, however, “Gods” were spoken of, as in the expression “Father of Gods and men,” and elsewhere. Once he reproached himself (a lower or imaginary self) for repining against the Cosmos because he was lame, almost as if the Cosmos itself were Providence or God: “Wretched creature! For the sake of one paltry leg, to impeach the Cosmos!” But he went on to call the Cosmos “the Whole of Things.” And then he called on each man to sacrifice some part of himself (a lame man, for example, sacrificing his lame leg) to the Universe: “What! Will you not make a present of it (i.e. the leg) to the Whole of Things? Let go this leg of yours! Yield it up gladly to Him that gave it! What! Will you sulk and fret against the ordinances of Zeus, which He—in concert with the Fates present at your birth and spinning the thread for you—decreed and ordained?”

I remember, too, how once, while professing to represent the doctrines of the philosophers in two sections, he spoke, in the first section, of “Him,” but in the second, of “Them,” thus: “The philosophers say that we must in the first place learn this, the existence of God, and that He provides for the Universe, and that nothing—whether deed or purpose or thought—can lie hidden from Him. In the next place [we must learn] of what nature They (i.e. the Gods) are. For, of whatever nature They may be found to be, he that would fain please Them and obey [Them] must needs endeavour (to the best of his ability) to be made like unto Them.”

What did he mean by “THEM”? And why did he use THEM directly after HIM? I believe he did it deliberately. For in the very next sentence he expressed God in a neuter adjective, “If THE DIVINE [BEING] is trustworthy, man also must needs be trustworthy.” He seemed to me to pass from masculine singular to masculine plural and from that to neuter singular, as much as to say, “Take notice. I use HIM, THEM, and IT in three consecutive sentences, and all about God, to shew you that God is not any one of these, but all.”

Similarly, after condemning the attempt of philosophers to please the rulers of the earth, he said, “I know whom I must needs please, and submit to, and obey—God and those next to Him.” But then he continued in the singular (“He made me at one with myself” and so on). And I think I may safely say that I never heard him allow his ideal philosopher or Cynic to address God in the plural with “ye” or “you.” It was always “thou,” as in the utterance I quoted above—“Thine were they all and thou gavest them to me.”

Well, then, whom did he mean by “those next to” God? I think he referred to certain guardian angels—“daemons” he called them, and so will I, spelling it thus, so as to distinguish it from “demon” meaning “devil”—one of whom (he said) was allotted by God to each human being. This, according to Epictetus, did not exclude the general inspection of mankind by God Himself: “To each He has assigned a Guardian, the Daemon of each mortal, to be his guard and keeper, sleepless and undeceivable. Therefore, whenever you shut your doors and make darkness in the house, remember never to say that you are alone. For you are not alone. God is in the house, and your Daemon is in the house. And what need have these of light to see what you are doing?”

This guardian Daemon, or daemonic Guardian, was said by some of our fellow-scholars to be the portion of the divine Logos within us, in virtue of which our Teacher distinguished men from beasts. Notably did he once make this distinction—in answer to some imaginary questioner, who was supposed to class man with irrational animals because he is subject to animal necessities. “Cattle,” replied Epictetus, “are works of God, but not preeminent, and certainly not parts of God; but thou”—turning to the supposed opponent—“art a fragment broken off from God; thou hast in thyself a part of Him. Why then ignore thy noble birth? Why dost thou not recognise whence thou hast come? Wilt thou not remember, in the moment of eating, what a Being thou art—thou that eatest—what a Being it is that thou feedest? Wilt thou not recognise what it is that employs thy senses and thy faculties? Knowest thou not that thou art feeding God, yea, taking God with thee to the gymnasium? God, God dost thou carry about, thou miserable creature, and thou knowest it not!”

We were rather startled at this. In what sense could a miserable creature “carry about God”? Epictetus proceeded, “Dost thou fancy that I am speaking of a god of gold or silver, an outside thing? It is within thyself that thou carriest Him. And thou perceivest not that thou art defiling Him with impure purposes and filthy actions! Before the face of a mere statue of the God thou wouldst not dare to do any of the deeds thou art daily doing. Yet in the presence of the God Himself, within thee, looking at all thy acts, listening to all thy words and thoughts, thou art not ashamed to continue thinking the same bad thoughts and doing the same bad deeds—blind to thine own nature and banned by God’s wrath!”

From this it appeared that the Daemon in each man was good and veritably God, and turned men towards God and goodness; but that some did not perceive the presence and were deaf to the voice. These were “miserable wretches” and “banned by God’s wrath.” Thus in some sense, the same God seemed to be the cause of virtue in some but of vice in others. This accorded with a saying of Epictetus on another occasion that God “ordained that there should be summer and winter, fruitfulness and fruitlessness, virtue and vice.” Then the question arose, To how many did the Logos of God bring virtue and to how many did it result in vice? And again, Did it bring virtue to as many as the Logos of God, or God, desired? Or was He unable to fulfil His desire, as in the case of that imaginary opponent, for example, so that the Supreme would have to say to him, as to Epictetus, “If I could have, I would have. But now, make no mistake. I could not bring virtue unto thee.” I was disposed to think that Epictetus would have laid the blame on the opponent, who, he would have said, might have obeyed the Logos in himself, if he had chosen to do so. According to our Teacher’s doctrine, God would say to this man nothing more cruel, or less just, than He says to all, “I could not force virtue on thee, nor on any man. If I forced virtue on thee, virtue would cease to be virtue and God would cease to be God.” But still the uneasy feeling came to me—not indeed at the time of this lecture (or at least not to any great extent) but afterwards—that the God of Epictetus was hampered by what Epictetus called “the clay,” which He “would have liked” to make immortal, if He “had been able.” What if each man’s “clay” was different? Who made the clay? What if God controlled nothing more than the shaping of the clay, and this, too, only in conjunction with the Fates? What if the Fates alone were responsible for the making of the clay? In that case, must not the Fates be regarded as higher Beings, even above the Maker of the Cosmos—higher in some sense, but bad Beings or weak Beings, spoiling the Maker’s work by supplying Him with bad material so that He could not do what He would have liked to have done?

Epictetus, I subsequently found, would never see difficulties of this kind. He represented the Supreme as a great stage manager, allotting to all their appropriate parts: “Thou art the sun; go on thy rounds, minister to all things. Thou art a heifer; when the lion appears, play thy part, or suffer for it. Thou art a bull; fight as champion of the herd. Thou canst lead the host against Ilium; be thou Agamemnon. Thou canst cope with Hector; be thou Achilles.” He did not add, “Thou canst spit venom and slander against the good and great; be thou Thersites.” But I did not think of that at the time.

For the moment, I was carried away by the fervour of the speaker. “He,” I said, “has been a slave, the slave of Nero’s freedman; he has seen things at their worst; and yet he believes that virtue, freedom, and peace, are placed by God in the power of all that will obey the Logos, His gift, within their hearts!” So I believed it, or persuaded myself that I believed it. Epictetus insisted, in the strongest terms, that the divine Providence extends to all. “God,” he said, “does not neglect a single one, even of the least of His creatures.” Stimulating us to be good instead of talking about being good, he exclaimed, “How grand it is for each of you to be able to say, The very thing that people are solemnly arguing about in the schools as an impossible ideal, that very thing I am accomplishing. They are, in effect, expatiating on my virtues, investigating me, and singing my praises. Zeus has been pleased that I should receive from my own self a demonstration of the truth of this ideal, while He Himself tests and tries me to see whether I am a worthy soldier of His army, and a worthy citizen of His city. At the same time it has been His pleasure to bring me forward that I may testify concerning the things that lie outside the will, and that I may cry aloud to the world, ‘Behold, O men, that your fears are idle! Vain, all vain, are your greedy and covetous desires. Seek not the Good in the outside world! Seek it in yourselves! Else, ye will not find it.’ Engaging me for such a mission, and for such a testimony as this, God now leads me hither, now sends me thither; exhibits me to mankind in poverty, in disease—ruler in fact but no ruler in the eyes of men—banishes me to the rocks of Gyara, or drags me into prison or into bonds! And all this, not hating me. No, God forbid! Who can hate his own best and most faithful servant? No, nor neglecting me. How could He? For He does not neglect the meanest of His creatures. No, He is training and practising me, He is employing me as His witness to the rest of mankind. And I, being set down by Him for such high service as this—can I possibly find time to entertain anxieties about where I am, or with whom I am living, or what men say about me? How can I fail to be, with my whole might and my whole being, intent on God, and on His commandments and ordinances?”

I noted with pleasure here the words, “He does not neglect the meanest of His creatures.” To the same effect elsewhere, speaking of Zeus, he said, “In very truth, the universal frame of things is badly managed unless Zeus takes care of all His own citizens, in order that they may be blessed like unto Himself.” A little before this, he said about Hercules, “He left his children behind him without a groan or regret—not as though he were leaving them orphans, for he knew that no man is an orphan,” because Zeus is “Father of men.”

In all these passages describing the fatherhood of God and the sonship of man, Epictetus spoke of virtue as being, by itself, a sufficient reward, in respect of the ineffable peace that it brings through the consciousness of being united to God. But how long this union lasted, and whether its durability was proof against death—as Socrates taught—about this he had hitherto said nothing. The Cynic, he again and again insisted, was God’s son; but he did not insist that the son was as immortal as the Father. Sometimes indeed he described the man of temperance and self-control as “banqueting at the table of the Gods.” Still more, the man that had passed beyond temperance into contempt of earthly things—a rank to which Arrian and I did not aspire—such a Cynic as this he extolled as being not only fellow-guest with the Gods but also fellow-ruler. These expressions reminded me of what we used to learn by heart in Rome concerning the man described by Horace as “just and firm of purpose.” The poet likened him to Hercules transported aloft to the fiery citadel of heaven, and to the Emperor Augustus drinking nectar at the table of the Gods. But this was said about Augustus while he was still alive; and the poem did not seem to me to prove that Horace believed in the immortality of the soul. However, what Epictetus said about that will appear hereafter. For the present, I must explain why the teaching of Epictetus concerning the Gods, although it carried me away for a time, caused me bewilderment in the end, and made me feel the need of something beyond.

CHAPTER III
ARRIAN ON THE OATH OF THE CHRISTIANS

Up to the time of my coming to Nicopolis, my faith in the Gods had been like that of most official and educated Romans. First I had a literary belief not only in Zeus but also in Apollo, Athene, Demeter, and the rest of the Gods and Goddesses of Homer, tempered by a philosophic feeling that some of the Homeric and other myths about them, and about the less beautiful divinities, were not true, or were true only as allegories. In the next place I had a Roman or official belief in the destiny of the empire, and a recognition that its unity was best maintained by tolerating the worships of any number of national Gods and Goddesses; provided they did not tend to sedition and conspiracy, nor to such vices as were in contravention of the laws. Lastly, I recognised as the belief of many philosophers—and was myself half inclined to believe—that One God, or Zeus, so controlled the whole of things that it would hardly be atheistic if I sometimes regarded even Apollo, and Athene, and others, as personifying God’s attributes rather than as being Gods and Goddesses in themselves—although I myself, without scruple and in all willingness, should have offered them both worship and sacrifice. Personally, apart (I think) from the influences of childhood, I always shrank from definitely believing that the One God ever had been, or ever could be, “alone.”

It was with these confused opinions or feelings that I became a pupil of Epictetus. And at first, whatever he asserted about God, or the Gods, he made me believe it—as long as he was speaking. When he said “God,” or “Zeus,” or “Father,” or “HIM,” or “THEM,” or “Providence,” or “The Divine Being,” or “The Nature of All Things,” or whatever else, he dragged me as it were to the new Name, and made me follow as a captive and do it homage. But afterwards there came a reaction. The limbs of my mind, so to speak, became tired of being dragged. I longed for rest and found none. My homage, too, was dissipated by distraction. When he repeated as he often did—addressing each one of us individually, and therefore (I assumed) me among the rest—“Thou carriest about God,” he seemed to say to me, “Look within thyself for Him whom thou must worship.” That was not helpful, it was the reverse of helpful—at least, to me. I felt vaguely then (and now as a Christian I know) that men have need not only to look within, but also (and much more) to look up—up to the Father in heaven with the aid of His Spirit on earth. It was due to Epictetus that at this time I—however faintly—began to feel this need.

Epictetus seemed to have no consistent view either of the unity of God or of the possibility of plural Gods. In Rome, we have three altars to the Goddess Febris, or Fever. Epictetus once referred to Febris in the reply of a philosopher to a tyrant. The latter says, “I have power to cut off your head”; the former replies, “You are in the right. I quite forgot that I must pay you homage as people do to Fever and Cholera, and erect an altar to you, as indeed in Rome there is an altar to Fever.” It was hardly possible to mistake the Master’s mockery of this worship. On the other hand, he was bitterly sarcastic against those who denied the existence of Demeter, the Koré her daughter, and Pluto the husband of the Koré. These deities our Master regarded as representing bread. “O, the gratitude,” he exclaimed, “O, the reverence of these creatures! Day by day they eat bread; and yet they have the face to say ‘We do not know whether there is any such a being as Demeter, or the Koré, or Pluto!’” It never seemed to occur to him that the worshippers of Febris might retort on him, “Day by day scores of people in Rome have the fever, and yet you have the face to say to us Romans, ‘I do not know whether there is any such a being as Febris or Cholera!’”

I think he never spoke of Poseidon, Ares, or Aphrodite, and hardly ever of Apollo. Even Athene he mentioned only thrice in Arrian’s hearing (so he told me), twice speaking of her statue by Phidias, and once representing Zeus as bemoaning His solitude (according to some notion, which he ridiculed) after a universal conflagration of gods and men and things, “Miserable me! I have neither Hera, nor Athene, nor Apollo!” It was for Zeus alone, as God, that our Teacher reserved his devotion. And for Him he displayed a passionate enthusiasm, the absolute sincerity of which it never entered into my mind to question; nor do I question it now. Under this God he served as a soldier, or lived as a citizen. To this God he testified as a witness that others might believe and worship. In this view of human life—as being a testimony to God—his teaching was most convincing to me, even when I felt, as I always did, that something was wanting in any conception of God that regarded Him as ever being “alone.”

Now I pass to another matter, not of great interest to me at the time, but of great importance to me in its results, because it led to my first knowledge—that could be called knowledge—of the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. It arose from a passage in the lecture I described in my last chapter. Epictetus was speaking about “the whole frame of things” as being a kind of fluid, in which the thrill of one portion affects all the rest, and about God and the Guardian Dæmon as feeling our every motion and thought. He concluded by calling on us to take an oath—a military oath, or sacramentum, as we call it in Latin—such as soldiers take to the Emperor. “They,” he said, “taking on themselves the life of service for pay, swear to prefer above all things the safety of Cæsar. You, who have been counted worthy of such vast gifts, will you not likewise swear, and, after taking your oath, abide by it? And what shall the oath be? Never to disobey, never to accuse, never to find fault with any of the gifts that have been given by Him; never to do reluctantly, never to suffer reluctantly, anything that may be necessary. This oath is like theirs—after a fashion. The soldiers of Cæsar swear not to prefer another to him; God’s soldiers swear to prefer themselves to everything.”

On me this came somewhat as bathos. But it was a frequent paradox with him; and of course, in one sense, it was not a paradox but common sense. What he meant by bidding us “prefer ourselves” was “prefer virtue,” which he always described as each man’s true “profit.” Everyone, he said, must prefer his own “profit” to everything else, even to father, brothers, children, wife. Zeus Himself—so he taught—prefers His own “profit”—which consists in being Father of all. Take away this thin veil of apparent egotism, and the oath might be described as an oath to live and die for righteousness, for the Logos or Word of God within us, and, thus, for God Himself. But why, I thought, disguise loyalty under the mask of self-seeking? This notion of a military oath taken to God, and at the same time to oneself—and an oath, so to speak, of negative allegiance, not to do this or that—did not inspire me with the same enthusiasm as the more positive doctrine and the picture of the wandering Cynic going about the world and actively doing good and destroying evil.

Arrian, however, was taking down this passage about the military oath with even more than his usual earnestness and rapidity. “Did that impress you?” said I, as we left the lecture-room together. “On me it fell a little flat.” He did not answer at once. Presently, as if rousing himself from a reverie, “Forgive me,” he said, “I was thinking of something that occurred in our neighbourhood about fifteen years ago. You know I was born in Bithynia. Well, about that time, there was a great outbreak of that Jewish superstition of which you must often have heard in Rome, practised by the followers of Christus. They are suspected of all sorts of horrible crimes and abominations, as you know, I dare say, better than I do, being familiar with what the common people say about them in Rome. Moreover the new work just published by your Tacitus—a lover of truth if any man is—severely condemns them. I am bound to say our Governor did not think so badly of them as Tacitus does. Perhaps in Rome and in Nero’s time they were more savage and vicious than among us in Bithynia recently. However, that matters little. The question was not about their private vices or virtues. Our Governor believed them guilty of treasonable conspiracy. So he determined to stop it.

“Stop it he did; or, at all events, to a very great extent. But the point of interest for me is, that when these fellows were had up before our Governor—it was Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus, an intimate friend of the Emperor Trajan—he found there was really no mischief at all to be apprehended from them. Secundus had heard something about a sacramentum, or military oath—and this is my point—which these people were in the habit of taking at their secret meetings. Naturally this convinced him at first that there must be something wrong. But, when he came to look into it, the whole thing came to no more than what I will now tell you. I am sure of my facts for I heard them from his secretary, who had a copy of his letter to the Emperor. It was to this effect, ‘They affirm that the sum total of their crime or error is, that they were wont, on an appointed day, to meet together before daybreak and to sing an alternate chant to Christus, as to a God, and to bind themselves by an oath—not, as conspirators do, to commit some crime in common, but to avoid committing theft, robbery, adultery, fraud, breach of faith. This done, they break up. It is true they return to take food in common, but it is a mere harmless repast.’ After the Governor had gone carefully into the matter, putting a few women to the torture to get at the truth, he came to the conclusion that this so-called military oath, or sacramentum, had no harm whatever in it. The thing was merely a perverted superstition run wild. He very sensibly adopted the mild course of giving the poor deluded people a chance of denying their faith as they called it. The Emperor sanctioned his mildness. Most of them recanted. Things settled down, and promised to be very much as they were before. At least so the Governor thought. We, outside the palace, were not quite so sanguine. But anyhow, what struck me to-day was the similarity between the military oath of these Christians and the military oath prescribed by our great Teacher to his Cynics.”

“But,” said I, “does it not seem to you that our military oath ought to be a positive one, namely, that we Cynics will go anywhere and do anything that the General may command—and not a negative one, that we will abstain from grumbling against His orders?” Arrian replied, “As to that, I think our Master follows Socrates, who expressly says that he had indeed a daemon, or at all events a daemonic voice; but that it told him only what to avoid, not what to do.” “Surely,” replied I, “what Socrates said on his trial was, ‘How could I be fairly described as introducing new daemons when saying that a voice of God manifestly points out to me what I ought to do?’” “I do not remember that,” said my friend, “but we are near my rooms. Come in and let us look into Plato’s Apologia.”

So we went in, and Arrian took out of his book-case Plato’s account of the Speech of Socrates before the jury that condemned him to death. “There, Silanus,” said he, “you see I was right.” And he pointed to these words, “There comes to me, as you have often heard me say, a divine and daemonic something, which indeed my prosecutor Meletus mentioned and burlesqued in his written indictment. This thing, in its commencement, dates back (I believe) from my boyhood, a kind of Voice that comes to me from time to time, and, whenever it comes, it always”—“Mark this,” said Arrian—“turns me back from doing that (whatever it may be) which I am purposing to do, but never moves me forward.”

I seemed fairly and fully confuted. But suddenly it occurred to me to ask my friend to let me see Xenophon’s version of the same speech. He brought it out. I was not long before I disinterred the very words that I have quoted above, “a Voice of God that manifestly points out to me what I ought to do.” And the context, too, indicated that the Voice—which he calls daemonic, or a daemonion—gave positive directions, recognised as such by his friends.

This very important difference between Plato and Xenophon in regard to the daemon of Socrates, as described by Socrates himself, interested Arrian not a little. “Come back,” he said, “in the evening, when I shall have finished reducing my notes to writing, and let us put the two versions side by side and see how many passages we can find agreeing.” So I came back after sunset, and we sat down and went carefully through them. And, as far as I remember, we could not find these two great biographers of this great man agreeing in so much as a dozen consecutive words in their several records of his Apologia, his only public speech. Presently—Arrian having Xenophon in his hand and I Plato—I read out the well-known words of Socrates about Anytus and Meletus, his accusers, and about their power to kill him but not to hurt him. “What,” said I, “is Xenophon’s version of this?” “He omits it altogether,” replied Arrian; “but I see, reading on, that he puts into the mouth of Socrates an entirely different saying about Anytus, after the condemnation. Let me see the Plato.” Taking it from my hand, he observed, “Our Master, Epictetus, who is continually quoting these words of Plato’s, never quotes them exactly. ‘Anytus and Meletus may kill me but they cannot hurt me’—that is always his condensed version. But you see it is not Plato’s, Plato’s is much longer.”

So the conversation strayed away in a literary direction. We talked a great deal—without much knowledge, at least on my part—about oral tradition. I remarked on the possibilities in it of astonishing divergences and distortions of doctrine—“unless,” said I, as I rose up to go, “it happens, by good fortune, to be taken down at the time by an honest fellow like you, who loves his teacher, but loves the truth more, so that he just sets down what he hears, as he hears it.” “I do my best,” said Arrian; “but if it were not nearly midnight, I could shew you that even my best is not always good enough. I suspect that such sayings of our Master as become most current will be very variously reported a hundred years hence.”

“Good-night,” said I, and was opening the door to depart, when it flashed upon me that all this time, although we had been discussing Socrates, and assuming a resemblance between him and our Master, we had said nothing about that great doctrine in the profession of which Socrates breathed his last—prescribing a sacrifice to Æsculapius as though death were the beginning of a higher life—I mean the immortality of the soul. “I will not stay now,” said I, “but we have not said a word about Epictetus’s doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul; could you lend me some of your notes about it?” “He seldom speaks of it,” replied my friend; “when he does, it is not always easy to distinguish between metaphor and not-metaphor. My notes, so far, do not quite satisfy me that I have done him justice. He is likely to touch on it in the next lecture or soon after. I should prefer you to hear for yourself what he says.”

“One more question,” said I. “Did our Master ever, in your hearing, refer to that last strange saying of Socrates, ‘We owe a cock to Æsculapius’? Sometimes it seems to me the finest epigram in all Greek literature.” “Never,” replied Arrian. “He has never mentioned it either in my hearing, or in the hearing of those whom I have asked about it. And I have asked many.”

Departing home I found myself almost at once forgetting our long literary discussion about oral tradition, in the larger and deeper question touched on in the last few minutes. Why should not Arrian have been able to “do justice” to Epictetus in this particular subject? Was it that our Teacher did not quite “do justice” to himself? Then I began to ask what Epictetus had meant precisely by such expressions as that men may become “fellow-banqueters” and even “fellow-rulers” with “the Gods.” “If God Himself is immortal, how,” said I, “can ‘God’s own son’ fail to be immortal also?”

All through that night, even till near dawn, I was harassed with wild and wearying dreams. I travelled, wandering through wilderness after wilderness in quest of Socrates and nowhere finding him. Wherever I went I seemed to hear a strange monotonous cry that followed close behind me. Presently I heard a flapping of wings, and I knew that the sound was the crowing of the cock that was to be offered for Socrates to Æsculapius. Then it became a mocking, inarticulate, human voice striving to utter articulate speech. At last I heard distinctly, “If Zeus could have, he would have. If he could have, he would have. But he could not.”

CHAPTER IV
SCAURUS ON EPICTETUS AND PAUL

The cock was still crowing when I started out of my dream. It was not yet dawn but sleep was impossible. When Arrian called to accompany me to lecture, he found me in a fever and sent in a physician, by whose advice I stayed indoors for two or three days. During this enforced inaction, I resolved to write to my old friend Scaurus. Marcus Æmilius Scaurus—for that was his name in full—had been a friend of my father’s, years before I was born; and his advice had been largely the cause of my coming to Nicopolis. Scaurus had seen service; but for many years past he had devoted himself wholly to literature, not as a rhetorician, nor as a lover of the poets, but as “a practical historian,” so he called it. By this he meant to distinguish himself from what he called “ornamental historians.” “History,” he used to say, “contains truth in a well; and I like trying to draw it out.”

For a man of nearly seventy, Scaurus was remarkably vigorous in mind and thought, with large stores of observation and learning, of a sort not common among Romans of good birth. His favourite motto was, “Quick to perceive, slow to believe.” I used to think he erred on the side of believing too little, and his friends used to call him Miso-mythus or “Myth-hater.” But over and over again, when I had ventured to discuss with him a matter of documentary evidence, I had found that his incredulity was justified; so that I had come to admit that there was some force in his protest, that he ought to be called, not “Myth-hater,” but “Truth-lover.”

In the year after my fathers death, when I was wasting my time in Rome, and in danger of doing worse, Scaurus took me to task as befitted my father’s dearest friend—a cousin also of my mother, who had died while I was still an infant. He had long desired me to enter the army, and I should have done so but for illness. Now that my health was almost restored, he returned to his previous advice, but suggested that, for the present, I might spend a month or two with advantage in attending the lectures of Epictetus, of whom he knew something while he was in Rome, and about whom he had heard a good deal since. When I demurred, and told him that I had heard a good many philosophers and did not care for them, he replied, “Epictetus you will not find a common philosopher.” He pressed me and I yielded.

Since my coming to Nicopolis, I had written once to tell him of my arrival, and to thank him for advising me to come to so admirable a teacher. But I had been too much absorbed in the teaching to enter into detail. Now, having leisure, and knowing his great interest in such subjects, I wrote to him even more fully than I have done for my readers above, sending him all my lecture notes; and I asked him what he judged to be the secret of Epictetus, which made him so different from other philosophers. Nor did I omit to tell him of my talk with Arrian about the Christians and their sacramentum.

Many days elapsed, and I had been attending lectures again for a long time, before his letter in reply reached Nicopolis; but I will set it down here, as also a second letter from him on the same subject. In the first, Scaurus expressed his satisfaction at my meeting with Arrian (whom he knew and described as an extremely sensible and promising young man, likely to get on). He added a hope that I would take precisely Arrian’s view of the advantage to be derived from philosophy. But a large part of his letter—much more than I could have wished—was occupied with our “wonderful discovery” (as he called it) that Plato and Xenophon disagreed in their versions of the Apologia of Socrates. On this he rallied us as mere babes in criticism, but, said he, not much more babyish than many professed critics, who cannot be made to understand that—outside poetry, and traditions learned by rote, and a few “aculeate sayings” (so he called them) of philosophers and great men—no two historians ever agree independently—he laid stress on “independently”—for twenty consecutive words, in recording a speech or dialogue. “I will not lay you a wager,” said he, “for it would be cheating you. But I will make you an offer. If you and Arrian, between you, can find twenty identical consecutive words of Socrates in the whole of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Dialogues, I will give you five hundred sesterces apiece[1]. Your failure (for fail you will) ought to strike you as all the more remarkable because both Plato and Xenophon tell us that Socrates used to describe himself as ‘always saying the same things about the same subjects.’ That one similar saying they have preserved. For the rest, these two great biographers, writing page upon page of Socratic talk, cannot agree exactly about ‘the same things’ for a score of consecutive words!”

He added more, not of great interest to me, about the credulity of those who persuaded themselves that Xenophon’s version must be spurious just because it differed from Plato’s, whereas, said he, this very difference went to shew that it was genuine, and that Xenophon was tacitly correcting Plato. But concerning the secret of Epictetus he said very little—and that, merely in reference to the sacramentum of the Christians which I mentioned in my first letter. On this he remarked that Pliny, with whom he had been well acquainted, had never mentioned the matter to him. “But that,” he said, “is not surprising. His measures to suppress the Christian superstition did not prove so successful as he had hoped. Moreover he disliked the whole business—having to deal with mendacious informers on one side, and fanatical fools or hysterical women on the other. And I, who knew a good deal more about the Christians than Pliny did, disliked the subject still more. My conviction is, however, that your excellent Epictetus—rationalist though he is now, and even less prone to belief than Socrates—has not been always unscathed by that same Christian infection (for that is the right name for it).

“Partly, he sympathizes with the Christian hatred or contempt for ‘the powers of this world’ (to use their phrase) and partly with their allegiance to one God, whom he and they regard as casting down kings and setting up philosophers. But there is this gulf between them. The Christians think of their champion, Christus, as having devoted himself to death for their sake, and then as having been miraculously raised from the dead, and as, even now, present among them whenever they choose to meet together and ‘sing hymns to him as to a God.’ Epictetus absolutely disbelieves this. Hence, he is at a great disadvantage—I mean, of course, as a preacher, not as a philosopher. The Christians have their God, standing in the midst of their daily assemblies, before whom they can ‘corybantize’—to repeat your expression—to their hearts’ content. Your teacher has nothing—nay, worse than nothing, for he has a blank and feels it to be a blank.

“What does he do then? He fills the blank with a Hercules or a Diogenes or a Socrates, and he corybantizes before that. But it is a make-believe, though an honest one. I have said more than I intended. You know how I ramble on paper. And the habit is growing on me. Let no casual word of mine make you doubt that Epictetus is thoroughly honest. But honest men may be deceived. Be ‘quick in perceiving, slow in believing.’ Keep to Arrian’s view of a useful and practical life in the world, the world as it is, not as it might be in Plato’s Republic—which, by the way, would be a very dull place. Farewell.”

This letter did not satisfy me at all. “Honest men,” I repeated, “may be deceived.” True, and Scaurus, though honest as the day, is no exception. To think that Epictetus, our Epictetus—for so Arrian and I used to call him—had been even for a time under the spell of such a superstition as this! I had always assumed—and my conversation with Arrian about what seemed exceptional experiences in Bithynia had done little to shake my assumption—that the Christians were a vile Jewish sect, morose, debased, given up to monstrous secret vices, hostile to the Empire, and hateful to Gods and men. What was the ground for connecting Epictetus with them? Contempt for rulers? That was no new thing in philosophers. Many of them had despised kings, or affected to despise them, without any intention of rebelling against them. What though Epictetus suggested, in a hyperbolical or metaphorical way, a religious sacramentum for philosophers? This was quite different from that of the Christians as mentioned by Arrian. I could not help feeling that, for once, my old friend had “perceived” little and “believed” much.

Perhaps my reply shewed traces of this feeling. At all events, Scaurus wrote back, asking whether I had observed in him “a habit of basing conclusions on slight grounds.” Then he continued “I told you that I knew a good deal about the Christians. I also know a great deal more about Epictetus than you suppose. When I was a young man, I attended the lectures of that most admirable of philosophers, Musonius Rufus. About the time when I left, Epictetus, then a slave, was brought to the classes by his master, Epaphroditus; and Rufus, whom I shall always regard with respect and affection, spoke to me about his new pupil in the highest terms. Afterwards he often told me how he tried to arm the poor boy with philosophy against what he would have to endure from such a master. Many a time have I thought that the young philosopher must have needed all his Stoic armour, going home from the lecture-room of Rufus to the palace of Nero’s freedman.

“But I also remember seeing him long before that, when he came one morning as a mere child not twelve years old, along with Epaphroditus, to Nero’s Palace. I was then about fourteen or fifteen. After we had left the Palace—my father and I—we came upon him again on that same evening, staring at some Christians, smeared with pitch and burning away like so many flaring torches, to light the Imperial Gardens—one of Nero’s insane or bestial freaks! I have never been able to forget the sight, and I have often thought that he could never forget it. Somewhere about that time, one of the Christian ringleaders, Paulus by name, was put to death. As happens in such cases, his people began to collect every scrap of his writings that could be found. A little volume of them came into my hands some twenty years ago. But long before that date, all through the period when Epictetus was in Rufus’s classes, the Christian slaves in Rome had in their hands the letters of this Paulus or Paul. One of them, the longest, written to the Christians in Rome (a few years before Paul was brought to the City as a prisoner) goes back as far as sixty years ago. Some are still earlier. I saw the volume more than once in Cæsar’s Palace in the days of Vespasian. This Paul was one of the most practical of men, and his letters are steeped in practical experience. Epictetus, besides being a great devourer of literature in general, devoured in particular everything that bore on practical life. The odds are great that he would have come across the book somewhere among his slave or freedman friends.

“But I do not trust to such mere antecedent probabilities. You must know that, ever since Epictetus set up as a philosopher, I have followed his career with interest. Recluse though I am, I have many friends and correspondents. These, from time to time, have furnished me with notes of his lectures. Well, when I came to read Paul’s letters, I was prepared to find in them certain general similarities to Stoic doctrine; for Paul was a man of Tarsus and might have picked up these things at the University there. But I found a great deal more. I found particularities, just of the sort that you find in your lectures. Paul’s actual experiences had been exactly those of a vagrant Æsculapius or Hercules. Your friend idealizes the wanderings of Hercules; Paul enacted them. Paul journeyed from city to city, from continent to continent, everywhere turning the world upside down—Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus, Colossæ, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Jerusalem again—last of all, Rome. Everywhere the slaves, the poor, the women, went after him. Everywhere he came into collision with the rulers of the earth. If he did not proclaim a war between them and his God, he at all events implied war.

“Now this is just what Epictetus would have liked to do. Only he could not often get people to take him in the same serious way, because he had not the same serious business in hand. I verily believe he was not altogether displeased when the Prefect of the City banished him with other philosophers of note under Domitian. I know certain philosophers who actually made money by being thus banished. It was an advertisement for their lectures. Don’t imagine that your philosopher made, or wished to make, money. No. But he made influence—which he valued above money.

“However, the Emperors and Prefects after Domitian were not such fools. They knew the difference between a real revolution and a revolution on paper. A mere theoretical exaltation of the mind above the body, a mere scholastic laudation of kingship over the minds of men as superior to kingship over their bodies—these things kings tolerate; for they mean nothing but words. But a revolution in the name of a person—a person, too, supposed by fanatics to be living and present in all their secret meetings, ‘wherever two or three are gathered together,’ for that is their phrase—this may mean a great deal. A person, regarded in this way, may take hold of men’s spirits. Missionaries pretending—or, still worse, believing—that they are speaking in the name of such a person, may lead crowds of silly folk into all sorts of sedition. They may refuse, for example, to adore the Emperor’s image and to offer sacrifice to the Gods of the State; or they might even attempt to subvert the foundations of society by withholding taxes, or by encouraging or inculcating some wholesale manumission of slaves. This sort of thing means war, and Paul, fifty years ago, was actually waging this war. Epictetus longs to be waging it now. As he cannot, he takes pleasure in urging his pupils to it, painting an imaginary battle array in which he sees imaginary soldiers waging, or destined to wage, imaginary conflicts with imaginary enemies.

“Hence that picturesque contrast (in the lecture you transcribed for me) between the unmarried and the married Cynic—which, besides the similarity of thought, contains some curious similarities to the actual words of Paul. It ran thus, ‘The condition of the times being such as it is, opposing forces, as it were, being drawn up in line of battle’—that was his expression. Well, what followed from this non-existent, hypothetical, imminent conflict? The Philosopher, it seems, must be a soldier, ‘undistracted, wholly devoted to the ministry of God, able to go about and visit men, not bound fast to private personal duties, not entangled in conditions of life that he cannot honourably transgress.’ And then he describes at great length a married Cynic dragged down from his royal throne by the claims and encumbrances of a nursery. Now this same ‘undistractedness’ (using the very word) of unmarried life Paul himself has mentioned in a letter to the Corinthians, where he says that ‘owing to the pressing necessity’ of the times, it was good for a man to be unmarried, and that he wished them to be ‘free from anxiety.’ He concludes ‘But I speak this for your own profit, not that I may cast a noose round you but that you may with all seemliness attend on the Lord undistractedly.’ Again, he writes to one of his assistants or subalterns, ‘Endure hardship with me as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one engaged in a campaign is entangled’—your friend’s word again—‘in the affairs of civil life.’

“I lay little stress on the similarity of word, but a great deal on the similarity of thought. There is no such conflict as Epictetus describes. There is no such ‘line of battle’—not at least for us, Romans, or for you, Cynics. But there is for the Christians—arrayed as they are against the authorities of the Empire. And that reminds me of your Epictetian antithesis between ‘the Beast’ and ‘the Man.’ It is a little like a Christian tradition about ‘the Beast.’ By ‘the Beast’ they mean Nero. They have never forgotten his treatment of them after the fire. For a long time after his death they had a notion—I believe some of them have it still—that the Beast may rise from the dead and persecute them again. They also expect—I cannot do more than allude to their fantastic dreams—a sort of ‘Son of Man’ to appear on the clouds taking vengeance on the armies of the Beast. So, you see, they, too, recognise an opposition between the Man and the Beast. Only, with the Christians it is of a date much earlier than Epictetus. It goes back to a Jewish tradition, which represents a sort of opposition between the empires of Beasts and the empire of the Son of Man, in a prophet named Daniel, some centuries ago.

“Epictetus, of course, does not believe in all this. But still he persuades himself that there is such a ‘line of battle’ in the air, and that he and his followers can take part in this aerial conflict by ‘going about the world’ as spiritually armed warriors, making themselves substantially miserable—or what the world would call such—while championing the cause of unsubstantial good against evil. All that you wrote to me about the missionary life and its hardships—its destitution, homelessness, nakedness, yes, even the extraordinary phrase you added from Arrian’s notes about the cudgelled Cynic, how he ‘must be cudgelled like a donkey, and, in the act of being cudgelled, must love his cudgellers as being the father of all and brother of all’—all this I could match, in a compressed form, from a passage in my little Pauline volume. Here it is: ‘For I think that God has made a show of us Missionaries’—Missionaries, or Apostles, that is their name for their wandering Æsculapii—‘like condemned criminals in the arena. We have been made a theatre-show to the universe, to angels and men …:—up to this very moment, hungering, thirsting, naked, buffeted, driven from place to place, toiling and labouring with our own hands. Reviled, we bless; persecuted, we endure. Men imprecate evil on us, we exhort them to their good. We have been made as the refuse of the universe, the offscouring of all, up to this very moment.’

“Again, elsewhere, Paul brings in that same Epictetian contrast between the external misery and the internal joy of the Missionary: ‘Never needlessly offending anyone in anything, lest the Service’—which your philosopher calls ‘the service of God’—‘be reproached, but in everything commending ourselves as the Servants of God, in much endurance, in tribulations, in necessities, in hardships, in scourgings, in prisons, in tumults, in toils, in watchings, in fastings.’ Now comes the contrast, indicating that all these things are superficial trifles, the petty pin-pricks inflicted by the spite of the contemptible world, but underneath lie the solid realities:—‘in purity, in knowledge, in longsuffering, in kindness and goodness, in the holy spirit, in love unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God.’

“This leads Paul to the thought of the armour of God, and the friends and enemies of God, the good and the evil, which this wandering Christian Hercules has to deal with: ‘By the arms of righteousness, on the right hand and on the left; by glory and dishonour; by ill report and good report—,’ he means, I think, ‘glory in the sight of God, dishonour in the sight of men,’ and again, ‘ill report on earth, good report in heaven.’ And so he continues, ‘as knaves and true’—that is, ‘knaves in appearance, in the world’s false judgment, but true men in the sight of Him who judges truly.’ It is a marvel of compression. And it is kept up in what follows:—‘misunderstood [i.e. by men] and well understood [i.e. by God]; dying, and behold we live; under the headsman’s scourge, yet not beheaded; grieving, but always rejoicing; beggars, but making many rich; having nothing, yet having all things for ever!’

“You will be tired of this. But your zeal for your new teacher brought it on you. You admire his ‘fervour.’ Then what do you think of this man’s fervour? He could give points to Epictetus both for fervour and for compression. I admit that Paul has not your master’s dramatic flash, irony, and epigrammatic twist. But, as for ‘fervour,’ here, I contend, is the original Falernian, which your friend Epictetus has watered down. Not that I blame him, either as regards style or in respect of morality. His humorous description of the nursery troubles of the married Stoic was very good—for his purpose, and for a lecture. But it would not have suited Paul. A lecturer must not be too brief. If Epictetus were to pack stuff in his lectures as Paul packs it in his epistles, your lesson would sometimes not last five minutes.

“But I am straying from the question, which is, whether Epictetus borrowed. Let me give you another instance. The Christians are permeated with two notions, the first is, that they have received an ‘invitation,’ ‘summons,’ or ‘calling’ (Klēsis they call it) to a heavenly Feast in a Kingdom of Heaven. The second is, that, if they are to attain to this Feast, they must pass through suffering and persecution, by ‘witnessing’ or ‘testifying’ to Christ, as being their King, in opposition to the Gods of the Romans. This ‘witness,’ or martyria, is so closely associated in their minds with the notion of persecution that ‘martyrdom,’ with them, has come to imply, almost always, death. Now, as far as I know, the Greeks do not anywhere use the word ‘calling’ in this sense. But look at what Epictetus says about a sham philosopher, who, having been ‘called’ by God to be a beggar, ‘disgraces his calling’: ‘How then dost thou mount the stage now? It is in the character of a witness called by God, who says “Come thou, and bear witness to me.”’ Then the sham philosopher whines out, ‘I am in a terrible strait, O Lord, and most unfortunate. None take thought for me; none give to me. All blame me. All speak evil of me.’ To which Epictetus replies, ‘Is this the witness thou wouldst bear, bringing shame on the calling wherewith He hath called thee, in that He honoured thee with so great an honour, and counted thee worthy to be promoted to the high task of such a witnessing?’ Now this phrase, ‘worthy of the calling,’ is Pauline in thought, and Pauline in word. Here is an instance, from a letter to the Thessalonians, ‘That our God would count you worthy of the calling.’ And Paul writes to the Ephesians, ‘That ye walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.’

“Again, you yourself remarked to me on the strangeness and originality of Epictetus’s expression about ‘eating,’ namely, that, in the very act of eating, or going to the gymnasium, or whatever else, the philosopher was to remember that he was ‘feeding on God’ and ‘carrying about God,’ and that he must not ‘defile’ the image of the God within him. Well, I admit it is strange, but I do not admit that it is original. I can match it in the first place with another passage from Epictetus himself, where he bids some of his uppish pupils, who wished to reform the world, first to reform themselves. ‘In this way,’ he said, ‘when eating, help those who eat with you; when drinking, those who drink with you.’ In the next place, I can match both out of the letter to the Corinthians, which says, ‘Ye are God’s temple,’ and ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, him will God destroy,’ and again, ‘Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, which ye have from God.’ It adds that people cause shame to others and injury to themselves by greediness at the sacred meals they take in common; and lastly, says Paul, ‘Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.’ There are things like this, of course, in Seneca, but none, as far as I know, that come so near as Epictetus does to the language of Paul.

“I could quote more from Paul, and also from other sacred books of the Christians, to shew that Epictetus is indebted to them. But I have been already led on by the fascination—to me it is a fascination—of a merely literary discussion, to say more than enough, and a great deal more than I intended. Let me conclude with an extract from a letter I lately rummaged up from my dear old friend Pliny, whom I greatly miss. He was the former Governor of Bithynia about whom you wrote. It refers to a very fine fellow, Artemidorus by name, a military tribune, son-in-law of the excellent Musonius (Epictetus’s teacher, whom I mentioned above). ‘Among the whole multitude of those who in these days call themselves philosophers, you will hardly find one so sincere, genuine, and true, as Artemidorus. I say nothing about his bodily endurance of heat and cold and the most arduous toil, of his indifference to the pleasures of the table, of the strict control with which he keeps his eyes and his passions in order. These are great virtues, but only great in others. In him they are but trifles compared with his other merits.’

“So wrote Pliny. Well, for me at all events, ‘to keep eyes and passions in order’ is not ‘a trifle.’ Perhaps it is not ‘a trifle’ for you. I fully believe that Musonius’s successor—for as such I regard Epictetus—in spite of some opinions in which I cannot quite follow him, will help you to attain this object. Give yourself wholly to that. I knew Artemidorus. So did your father. We both thought him the model of a soldier and a gentleman. Believe me, my dear Quintus, it would be one of the greatest comforts in my last moments if I could feel assured that—to some slight extent in consequence of advice from me—the son of my old friend Decimus Junius Silanus was following in the footsteps of one whom he so esteemed and admired. Farewell.”

This was the end of the letter. But out of it dropped a paper containing a sealed note. On the paper were these words: “To convince you that I had not judged your philosopher unfairly, I transcribed a few passages from other Christian documents, containing words assigned by Christians to Christ himself, which seem to me to have influenced Epictetus. On second thoughts, I have come to think it was waste of my time. That it might not waste yours too, I was on the point of throwing the thing into the fire. But I decided to send it rather than let you suppose me to be a crotchety, suspicious, prejudiced old man, ungenerous towards one whom both you and I respect with all our hearts. I grant that I am slow to believe in new facts; but I need hardly assure you, my dearest Quintus, that I am not slow to believe in good motives—the motives of good men, tried, tested, and proved, by such severe trials as have befallen your admirable Master. Rather than suspect me thus, break the seal and read it at once. But I hope you will not want to read it. Discussions of this sort must not be allowed to distract your energies as they might do. Better burn it. Or keep it—till you are military tribune.”

[1] In “Notes on Silanus,” 2809a, the author repeats this offer.

CHAPTER V
EPICTETUS ALLUDES TO JEWS

I did not open the sealed note, though I was not convinced that Epictetus had been a borrower. Paulus the Christian had begun to interest me, because of Scaurus’s quotations and remarks on his style. Indeed he interested me so much that I determined at once to procure a copy of his letters. But Christus himself—whom I call Christus here to distinguish the meaning with which I used the name then from that with which I began to use the name of “Christ” soon afterwards—Christus, I say, at that moment, did not interest me at all.

Moreover I was impressed by what Scaurus said about a military career. Though too young to remember much about the shameful days of Domitian, yet I had heard my father describe the anguish he used to feel, when letters from the Emperor to the Senate came announcing a glorious victory (duly honoured with a triumph) after which would come a private letter from Scaurus informing him that the victory was a disgraceful defeat. And even later on, even after the successes of Trajan, my father, in conversations with Scaurus, had often expressed, in my hearing, still lingering apprehensions of a time when the barbarians might break in like a flood upon the northern borders of the empire—if ever the imperial throne were cursed with a second Domitian. Patriotism would be even more needed then, he said, than when Marius beat back the Cimbri. All this gave additional weight to Scaurus’s remarks. “Artemidorus,” I said, “shall be my model. I will try to be a good soldier and a good Stoic in one.” So I locked up the note, still sealed.

Here I may say that afterwards, when I did open it, it did not greatly influence the course of my thoughts. By that time, I had come to think that Scaurus was right, and that Epictetus had really borrowed from the Christians. I opened it, therefore, not because I distrusted the fairness and soundness of his judgment, but because I trusted it and looked to him for information. As a fact, it rather confirmed his hypothesis of borrowing, but did not demonstrate anything. The real influence of that little note in my cabinet amounted, I think, to little more than this. In the period I am now about to describe, while daily studying the works of Paulus the Christian, I was beginning to ask myself “If Paulus the follower of Christus was so great a teacher, must not Christus have been greater?” In those days, when taking out Paul’s epistles from my bookcase, I used often to see that packet lying there, with WORDS OF CHRISTUS on it, and the seal unbroken. Then I used to say “If only I could make up my mind to open you, you might tell me wonderful things.” This stimulated my curiosity. It was one of many things—some little, some great—that led me toward my goal.

The reader may perhaps think that I, a Roman of equestrian rank, must have been already more prone to the Christian religion than I have admitted, if I attempted to procure a copy of Paul’s epistles from a bookseller in Nicopolis frequented by my fellow-students. But I made no such attempt. Possibly our bookseller there would not have had a copy. Probably he would not have confessed it if he had. In any case, I did not ask him. It happened that I needed at this time certain philosophic treatises (of Chrysippus and others). So I wrote to a freedman of my father’s in Rome, an enterprising bookseller, who catered for various tastes, giving him the titles of these works and telling him how to prepare and ornament them. Then I added that Æmilius Scaurus had sent me some remarkable extracts from the works of one Paulus, a Christian, and that the volume seemed likely to be interesting as a literary curiosity. This was perhaps a little understating the case. But not much. With Flaccus, my Roman bookseller, I felt quite safe. Rather than buy Paul’s epistles from Sosia in Nicopolis, I am sure I should not have bought them at all. Such are the trifles in our lives on which sometimes our course may depend—or may seem to have depended.

Meantime I had been attending lectures regularly and had become familiar with many of Epictetus’s frequently recurring expressions of doctrine. They were still almost always interesting, and generally impressive. But his success in forcing me to “feel, for the moment, precisely what he felt”—how often did I recognise the exact truth of this phrase of Arrian’s!—made me begin to distrust myself. And from distrust of myself sprang distrust of his teaching, too, when I found the feeling fade away (time after time) upon leaving the lecturer’s presence. When I sat down in my rooms to write out my notes, asking myself, “Can I honestly say I hope to be ever able to do this or that?” how often was I obliged to answer, “No!”

I could not trust his judgment about what we should be able to do, because I could not trust his insight into what we were. Two causes seemed to keep him out of sympathy with us. One was his own singular power of bearing physical pain—almost as though he were a stone and not flesh and blood. He thought that we had the same, or ought to have it. Another cause was his absorption in something that was not human, in a conception of God, whom (on some evidence clear to him but not made clear by him to us, or at all events not to me) he knew (not trusted or believed, but knew) to have bestowed on him, Epictetus, the power of being at once—not in the future, but at once, here on earth, at all times, and in all circumstances—perfectly blessed. Having his eyes fixed on this Supreme Giver of Peace, our Master often seemed to me hardly able to bring himself to look down to us, except when he was chiding our weakness.

Passing over several of the lectures that left me in the condition I have endeavoured to describe, I will now come to the one in which Epictetus alluded to Christians. “Jews” he called them. But he defined them in such a way as to convince Arrian that he meant Christians. Even if he did not, the impression produced on me was the same as if he had actually mentioned them by name. The lecture began with the subject of “steadfastness.” “A practical subject, this,” I said to myself, “for one in training to be a second Artemidorus.” But the “steadfastness” was not of the sort demanded in camps and battlefields. The essence of good, said the lecturer, is right choice, and that of evil a wrong choice. External things are not in our power, internal things are: “This Law God has laid down, If thou wilt have good, take it from thyself.” Then followed one of the now familiar dialogues, of which I was beginning to be a little tired, between a tyrant threatening a philosopher, who points out that he cannot possibly be threatened. The tyrant stares and says, “I will put you in chains.” The wise man replies, “It is my hands and feet that you threaten.” “I will cut off your head,” shouts the tyrant. “It is my head that you threaten,” replies the philosopher. After a good deal more of this, a pupil is supposed to ask, “Does not the tyrant threaten you then?” To this the lecturer replies, “Yes, if I fear these things. But if I have a feeling and conviction that these things are nothing to me, then I am not threatened.” Then he appealed to us, “Of whom do I stand in fear? What things must he be master of to make me afraid? Do you say, ‘The master of things that are in your power’? I reply, ‘There is no such master.’ As for things not in my power, what are they to me?”

Epictetus had a sort of rule or canon for us beginners, by which we were to take the measure of the so-called evils of life: “Make a habit of saying at once to every harsh-looking apparition of this sort, ‘You are an apparition and not at all the thing you appear to be. Are you of the number of the things in my power, or are you not? If not, you are nothing to me.’” Applying this to a concrete instance, our Master now dramatized a dialogue between himself and Agamemnon, who is supposed to be passing a sleepless night in anxiety for the Greeks, lest the Trojans should destroy them on the morrow.

“Epict. What! Tearing your hair! And you say your heart leaps in terror! And all for what? What is amiss with you? Money-matters?

“Ag. No.

“Epict. Health?

“Ag. No.

“Epict. No indeed! You have gold and silver to spare. What then is amiss with you? That part of you has been neglected and utterly corrupted, wherewith we desire etc. etc.”

Here Epictetus—after some customary technicalities—turned to us like a showman, to explain the royal puppet’s condition: “‘How neglected?’ you ask. He does not know the essence of the Good for which he has been created by nature, nor the essence of evil. He cries out, ‘Woe is me, the Greeks are in peril’ because he has not learned to distinguish what is really his own etc. etc.” After this apostrophe, which I have condensed, he resumed the dialogue:

“Ag. They are all dead men. The Trojans will exterminate them.

“Epict. And if the Trojans do not kill them, they are never, never to die, I suppose!!

“Ag. O, yes, they’ll die. But not at one blow, not to a man, like this.

“Epict. What difference does it make? If dying is an evil, then, surely, whether they die all together or one by one, it is equally an evil. And do you really think that dying will be anything more than the separating of the paltry body from the soul?

“Ag. Nothing more.

“Epict. And you, when the Greeks are in the act of perishing, is the door of escape shut for you? Is it not open to you to die?

“Ag. It is.

“Epict. Why then bewail? Bah! You, a king! And with the sceptre of Zeus, too! A king is never unfortunate, any more than God is unfortunate. What then are you? A shepherd in truth! For you weep, like the shepherds—when a wolf carries off one of their sheep. And these Greeks are fine sheep to submit to being ruled over by you. Why did you ever begin this Trojan business? Was your desire imperilled etc. etc.?” [Here I omit more technicalities.]

“Ag. No, but my brother’s darling wife was carried away.

“Epict. And was not that a great blessing, to be deprived of a ‘darling wife’ who was an adulteress?

“Ag. Were we then to submit to be trampled on by the Trojans?

“Epict. Trojans? What are the Trojans? Wise or foolish? If wise, why make war against them? If foolish, why care for them?”

I doubt whether Epictetus quite carried his class with him on this occasion. He certainly did not carry me, though he went on consistently pouring out various statements of his theory. For the first time in my experience of his lectures, I began to feel that his reiterations were really tedious. My thoughts strayed. I found myself questioning whether my model soldier and philosopher, Artemidorus, could possibly accept this teaching. Would Trajan, I asked, have been so sure of beating Decebalus, if he had considered the disgrace of Rome a matter “independent of choice,” and therefore “nothing to him,” “neither good nor evil”?

From this reverie I was roused by a sudden transition—to a picture of a well-trained youth going forth to a conflict worthy of his mettle. And now, I thought, we shall have something more like the ideal of my first lecture, a Hercules or Diogenes, going about to help and heal. But perhaps Epictetus drew a distinction between a Diogenes and mere well-trained youths, mere beginners in philosophy. At all events, what followed was only a kind of catechism to prepare us against adversity, and especially against official oppression. “Whenever,” said he, “you are in the act of going into the judgment hall of one in authority, remember that there is also Another from above, taking note of what is going on, and that you must please Him rather than the authority on earth.” This catechism he threw into the form of a dialogue between the youth and God—whom he called “Another.”

“Another. Exile, prison, bonds, death, and disgrace—what used you to call these things in the Schools?

“Pupil. I? Things indifferent.

“Another. Well, then, what do you call them now? Can it be that they have changed?

“Pupil. They have not.

“Another. You, then—have you changed?

“Pupil. I have not.

“Another. Say, then, what are ‘things indifferent’?

“Pupil. The things outside choice.

“Another. Say also the next words.

“Pupil. Things indifferent are nothing to me.

“Another. Say also about things good. What things used you to think good?

“Pupil. Right choice, right use of phenomena.

“Another. And what the end and object?

“Pupil. To follow thee.

“Another. Do you say the same things still?

“Pupil. I say the same things still.

“Another. Go your way, then, and be of good cheer, and remember these things, and you will see how a young and well-trained champion towers above the untrained.”

I wanted to hear him explain why he spoke of “Another,” instead of Zeus, or God. It struck me that he meant to suggest to us that in this visible world, whenever we say “this,” we must also say, in our minds, “another,” to remind ourselves of the invisible counterpart. “Especially must we say ‘Another’”—this, I thought, was his meaning—“when we speak about rulers. Visible rulers are mostly bad. We must prevent them from encroaching on the place that should be filled in our hearts by the Other, the invisible Ruler.”

Instead of this explanation, however, he concluded his lecture by warning us against insincerity, or “speaking from the lips,” and against trying to be on both sides, when we ought to choose between two contending sides. This he called “trimming.” And here it was—while addressing an imaginary “trimmer”—that he used the word “Jew.”

“Why,” said he—addressing the sham philosopher—“why do you try to impose on the multitude? Why pretend to be a Jew, being really a Greek? Whenever we see a man trimming, we are accustomed to say, ‘This fellow is no Jew, he is shamming.’ But when a man has taken into himself the feeling of the dipped and chosen”—these were his exact words, uttered with a gesture and tone of contempt—“then he is, both in name and in very truth, a Jew. Even so it is with us, having merely a sham baptism; Jews in theory, but something else in fact; far away from any real feeling of our theory, and far away from any intention of putting into practice the professions on which we plume ourselves—as though we knew what they really meant!” I could not quite make out this allusion to Jews. But there was no mistaking his next sentence, and it was the last in the lecture, “So, I repeat, it is with us. We are not equal to the fulfilment of the responsibilities of common humanity, not even up to the standard of Man. Yet we would fain take on ourselves in addition the burden of a philosopher. And what a burden! It is as though a weakling, without power to carry a ten-pound weight, were to aspire to heave the stone of Ajax!”

Thus he dismissed us. I went out, feeling like the “weakling” indeed, but without the slightest “aspiration to heave the stone of Ajax.” Perhaps Arrian wished to encourage me. For after we had walked on awhile in silence, he said, “The Master was rather cutting to-day. I remember his once saying that we ought to come away from him, not as from a theatre but as from a surgery. To-day the surgeon used the knife, and we don’t like it.”

“But what good has the knife done us?” I exclaimed. “If only I could feel that the surgeon had cut out the mischief, a touch of the knife should not make me wince. But the mischief within me seems more mischievous, and my strength for good less strong, for some things that I have heard to-day. Is a Roman to say, when fighting against barbarians for the name and fame of Rome, ‘These things are nothing to me’? Is Diogenes, healing mankind, his brethren, to say, ‘Your diseases are nothing to me’? And that fine phrase in the Catechism, ‘follow thee’—is it not really a disguised form of ‘follow myself’? Does it not mean, ‘follow the logos within me, my own reason, or my own reasonable will,’ or ‘follow my own peace of mind, on which my mind is bent, to the neglect of everything else’?”

“It does not mean that, for Epictetus himself, I am convinced,” said Arrian. “I believe not, for him,” said I; “but it has that meaning for me. His teaching does not teach—not me, at least, however it may be with others—the art of being steadfast. And what about others? Did not he himself just now admit that his logos was less powerful than the pathos of the Jews to produce steadfastness? What, by the way, is this pathos? Does it mean passionate and unreasonable conviction? And who on earth are these Jews that are ‘dipped and chosen’?”

My friend’s face brightened. Perhaps it was a relief to him to pass from theology to matter of literary fact. “I think,” he replied, “that he must mean the Jewish followers of Christus—the Christians, about whom we were lately talking.” “Then why,” said I, “does not he call them Christians?” “I do not know,” replied Arrian, “He has never mentioned either Christians or Christus in my hearing; but he has, in one lecture at all events, used the term ‘Galilæans’ to mean the Christians. And I feel sure that he means them here, because the other Jews do not practise baptism, except for proselytes, whereas the Christians are all baptized.” “But,” said I, “he does not call them ‘baptized.’ He calls them ‘dipped’.” “That is his brief allusive way,” said Arrian. “You know that we provincials, and sometimes even Athenians too, speak of dipping the hair, or, if I may invent the word, bapting it, where the literary people speak of blacking or dyeing it. That is just what our Master means. These Christians are not merely baptized; they are bapted. That is to say, they are permanently and unalterably stained, or dyed in grain. They are. We are not. That is his meaning. Afterwards, as you noticed, he dropped into the regular word ‘baptism,’ and spoke of us as sham-baptists.”

“But he also called them chosen,” said I, “—that is to say, if he meant chosen, and not caught or convicted.” Arrian smiled. “You have hit the mark without knowing it,” said he. “I noticed the word and took it down. It is another of his jibes! These Christians actually call themselves ‘elect’ or ‘chosen.’ I heard all about it in Bithynia. They profess to have been ‘called’ by Christus. Then, if they obey this ‘calling,’ and remain steadfast, following Christus, they are said to be ‘chosen’ or ‘elect.’ But our Master believes this ‘calling’ and ‘choosing’ to be moonshine, and these Christian Jews to be the victims of a mere delusion, caught by error. So he uses a word that might mean ‘chosen’ but might mean also ‘caught.’ They think themselves the former. He thinks them the latter.”

I hardly know why I refrained from telling my friend what Scaurus had told me about the probability that Epictetus had borrowed from the Christians. Partly it was, I think, because it was too long a story to begin just then; and I thought I might shock Arrian and not do Scaurus justice. Partly, I was curious to question Arrian further. So after a short silence, during which my friend seemed lost in thought, I said to him, “You know more about the Christians than I do. Do you think Epictetus knows much about them? And what precisely does he mean by ‘feeling,’ when he speaks of ‘taking up the feeling of the dipped’?”

“As for your first question,” said Arrian, “I am inclined to think that he knows a great deal about them. How could it be otherwise with a young slave in Rome under Nero, when all the world knew how the Christians were used to light the Emperor’s gardens? Moreover his contrast between the Jew and the Greek seemed to me to come forth as though it had been some time in his mind, though it had not broken out till to-day. He spoke with the bitterness of a conviction of long standing. If—contrary to his own rules—he could be ‘troubled,’ I should say our Master felt a real ‘trouble’ in being forced to confess that the Jew is above the Greek in steadfastness and constancy. As to your second question, I think he means that, whereas Greeks attain to wisdom through the reason (or logos) these Jews follow their God, or Christus, through what we Greeks call emotion or affection (i.e. pathos). And I am half disposed to think that this word pathos was used by him on the other occasion when he spoke of the Christian Jews as Galilæans.” “Could you quote it?” said I. “No, not accurately,” said Arrian, “it is rather long, and has difficulties. I should prefer you to have it exactly. Come into my rooms. I am going out on business, so that we cannot talk about it at present. But you shall copy it down.”

So I went in to copy it down. Arrian left me after finding the place for me in his notes. “You will see,” he said, “that the Galilæans are there described as being made intrepid ‘by habit.’ Well, that is certainly how I took the words down. But I am inclined to think it might have been ‘by feeling’—which seems to me to make better sense. But read the whole context and judge for yourself. The two phrases are easily confused. Now I leave you to your copying. Prosit! More about this, to-morrow.”

CHAPTER VI
PAUL ON THE LOVE OF CHRIST

The lecture from which I was transcribing was on “fearlessness.” What, it asked, makes a tyrant terrible? The answer was, “his armed guards.” A child, or madman, not knowing what guards and weapons mean, would not fear him. Men fear because they love life, and a tyrant can take life. Men also love wealth, wife, children. These things, too, a tyrant can take; so men fear him. But a madman, caring for none of these things, and ready to throw them away as a child might throw a handful of sand—a madman does not fear. Now came the words about “custom” and “Galilæans” to which Arrian had called my attention: “Well, then, is not this astonishing? Madness can now and then make a man thus fearless! Custom can make the Galilæans fearless! Yet—strange to say—reason and demonstration cannot make anyone understand that God has made all that is in the world, and has made the world itself, in its entirety, absolutely complete in itself and unimpeded in its motions, and has also made its separate parts individually for the use of all the parts collectively!”

The context made me see the force of Arrian’s remark. Epictetus appeared to be mentioning three influences under which men might resist the threats and tortures of a tyrant. In the first place was the “madness” of a lunatic. In the third place was the “logic,” or demonstration, of philosophy. In the second place, it would make good sense to suppose that Epictetus meant “feeling,” or “passionate enthusiasm.” This passage would then accord with the one mentioned above. Both passages would then affirm that the Christian Jews or Galilæans can do under the influence of “feeling” what the Greek Philosophers, or “lovers of wisdom,” cannot do with all the aid of reason (or “logos”). “Custom” would not make good sense unless the “Galilæans,” or Christians, had made a “custom” of hardening their bodies by severe asceticism. This (I had gathered from Arrian) was not the fact. In any case, it seemed clear that Epictetus was here again contrasting some kind of Jew with the Greek to the disadvantage of the latter.

Curiosity led me to read on a little further. The text dealt with Man’s place in the Cosmos, or Universe, as follows: “All the other parts of the Cosmos except man are far removed from the power of intelligently following its administration. But the living being that is endowed with logos, or reason, has therein a kind of ladder by which he may reason the way up to all these things. Thus he, and he alone, can understand that he is a part, and what kind of part, and that it is right and fit that the parts should yield to the whole.” This reminded me of the saying I have quoted above, “Will you not make a contribution of your leg to the Universe?” I think he meant “Will you not offer up your lameness, as a decreed part of the whole system of things, and as a sacrifice from you to the Supreme?”

This reasonable part of the Cosmos, this “living being that is endowed with logos,” Epictetus declared to be “by nature noble, magnanimous, and free.” Consequently, said he, it discerns that, of the things around it, some are at its disposal, while others are not; and that, if it will learn to find its profit and its good in the former class, it will be perfectly free and happy, “being thankful always for all things to God.”

This puzzled me not a little. I could not understand how Epictetus explained the means by which these “noble, magnanimous, and free” creatures, created so “by nature,” had degenerated into the weaklings, fools, profligates, and oppressors, upon whom he was constantly pouring scorn. Was not each man a “part” of the Cosmos? Was not the Cosmos “perfect and exempt from all disorder or impediment in any of its motions”? Did not each “part” in it—and consequently man—partake in this perfection and exemption, being “made for the service of the whole”? What cause did Epictetus find for the folly, vice, and injustice that he so often satirised and condemned as “subject to the wrath of God”? Man was a compound of “clay” and “logos.” The fault could not lie in the “logos.” Was it, after all, the mere “clay” that caused all this mischief? And then, lost in thought, turning over the loose sheets of Arrian’s notes, one after the other, I came again on the passage I have quoted above from Epictetus, “If I could have, I would have”—laying the fault, as it seemed, upon the “clay.” I could not help asking, “If God ‘could’ not remedy it, how much less ‘could’ I, being ‘clay,’ remedy myself, ‘clay’?”

Musing on these things I returned to my rooms, and was sitting down to write to Scaurus, when my servant entered with a parcel, from Rome, he said, forwarded by Sosia our bookseller. It contained the books I had ordered from Flaccus, with a letter from him, describing in detail the pains he had taken in having some of the rolls of Chrysippus and Cleanthes transcribed and ornamented, and saying that in addition to the “curious little volume containing the epistles of Paulus,” which, as I no doubt anticipated, were “not in the choicest Greek,” he had forwarded an epistle to the Hebrews. “This,” he said, “does not include in the commencement the usual mention of Paulus’s name, and it is not in his style. But I understand that it originated from the school of Paulus.”

There was more to the same effect, for Flaccus and I were on very friendly terms; and he was a good deal more than a mere seller of books. But I passed over it, for I was in haste to open the parcel. At the top were the copies of Cleanthes, Chrysippus, and others, in Flaccus’s best style. At the bottom of all were two rolls of flimsy papyrus. The larger and shabbier of the two fell to the ground open, and as I took it up, my eye lit on the following passage:—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or suffering or persecution or hunger or nakedness or peril or the sword? As it is written:

‘For thy sake are we done to death all the day long:

We were accounted as sheep of the shambles.’

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor sovereignties, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from that love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“This, at all events,” said I, “Scaurus cannot say that Epictetus has borrowed from Paul. Never have I heard Epictetus mention the word ‘love’; and here, in this one short passage, Paul uses it twice!” My next thought was that Scaurus was quite right in his estimate of Paul’s style. It was indeed terse, intense, fervid, strangely stimulating and constraining. “There is no lack of pathos,” I said, “Let us now test the logos.” So I sat down to study the passage, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the separate words and phrases.

“The love of Christ.” Well, Christus was their leader. The Christians still loved him, and clung to his memory. That was intelligible. But “that love of God which was in Christ” perplexed me. I read the whole passage over again. Gradually I began to see that the passage implied the Epictetian ideal—according to Scaurus, not Epictetian but Pauline or Christian—of a Son of God standing fearless and erect in the face of enemies, tyrants, oppression, death. But it also suggested invisible enemies—“angels and sovereignties” that seemed to be against the sons of God. And still I could not make out the expression, “that love of God which is in Christ Jesus.”

So I turned back to the words at the bottom of the preceding column:—“If God is for us, who is against us? He that spared not His own Son but delivered him up for us all, how shall He not also, with him, freely give us all things? It is God that maketh and calleth us righteous: who is he that shall condemn? It is Christ Jesus that died—or rather that was raised from the dead, who is on the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.” And so, coming to the end of the column, I looked on again to the words with which I had begun, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”

Now I could understand. “This,” said I, “is a great battle. There are sovereignties of evil against the good. The Son of the good God is supposed to devote himself to death, fighting against the hosts of evil. Or rather the Father sends him into the battle and he goes willingly. This Christus of the Galilæans is regarded by them as we Romans might think of one of the Decii plunging into the ranks of the enemy and devoting himself to death for the salvation of Rome. Philosophers might ask inconvenient questions about the nature of the God to whom the brave man devotes himself—whether it is Pluto, or Zeus, or Nemesis, or Fate. No philosopher, perhaps, would approve of this theory. But, in practice, the bravery stirs the spirits of those who believe it. Even if the sacrifice is discreditable to the Gods accepting it, it is creditable to the man making it.”

Turning back still further, I found that Paul imagined the Cosmos—or “creation” as he called it—to have gone wrong. He did not explain how. Nor did he prove it. He assumed it, looking forward, however, to a time when the wrong would be made right, and even more right than if it had never gone wrong: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present season are not fit to be spoken of in comparison of the glory that is destined to be revealed and to extend to us. For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth intently for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was made subject to change, decay, corruption—not willingly but for the sake of Him that made it thus subject—in hope, and for hope: because even this very creation, now corrupt, shall be made free from the slavery of corruption and brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole of creation groaneth together and travaileth together—up to this present time.”

This struck me as a very different message from that of Epictetus about Zeus. Both Paul and Epictetus seemed to agree as regards the past, that certain things had happened that were not pleasing to God, taken by themselves. But whereas the Greek said about God, “He would have, if He could have; but He could not,” the Jew seemed to say, “He can, and He will. Only wait and see. It will turn out to have been for the best.”

Reading on, I found something corresponding to Epictetus’s doctrine of the indwelling Logos, namely, that each of us has in himself a fragment of the Logos of God,—but Paul called it Spirit—in virtue of which we may claim kinship with Him, being indeed God’s children. Epictetus, however, never said that we were to pray to our Father for help. He seemed to think that each must derive his help from such portion of the Logos as each possessed. “Keep,” he said, “that which is your own,” “Take from yourselves your help,” “Within each man is ruin and help,” “Seek and ye shall find within you,” or words to that effect. Paul’s doctrine was different, teaching that we do not at present possess salvation and help to their full extent, but that we must look forward in hope: “And not only so, but we ourselves also, though possessing the firstfruits of the Spirit—we ourselves also, I say, groan within ourselves, waiting earnestly for the adoption, namely, the ransoming and deliverance of our body”—as though a time would come when that very same clay, which (according to Epictetus) the Creator would have wished to make immortal but could not, would be transmuted and transported in some way out of the region of flesh into the region of the spirit.

Moreover, besides looking onward in hope, we must also (Paul said) look upward for help. Epictetus, too, as I have said above, sometimes spoke of looking “upward,” and of the Cynic stretching up his hands to God. That, however, was not in prayer but in praise.

Epictetus never used the word “prayer” in my hearing except of foolish, idle, or selfish prayers. But Paul represented the Logos, or rather the Spirit, within us, as an emotional, not a merely reasonable power. “It searcheth all things, yea, even the deep things of God,” he said to the Corinthians; and by it (so he told the Romans in the passage I was just now quoting) the children express to the Father, and the Father receives from the children, their wants and aspirations: “For by hope were we saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that which we fail to see, then in patient endurance we earnestly wait for it. And in the same way the Spirit also taketh part with our weakness. For as to what we should pray for, according to our needs, we do not know. But the Spirit itself maketh representation in our behalf in sighings beyond speech. Now He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind and temper of the Spirit, because, being in union and accord with God, it maketh representation in behalf of the saints.”

This passage I only vaguely understood. For I started with the preconception that the spirit or breath or wind, must be only another metaphor—like “word”—to describe a “fragment” of God (as Epictetus called the Logos in man). I did not as yet understand that this Spirit might be regarded as, at one and the same moment, in heaven with God and on earth with men, representing the love and will of God to man below, and the love and prayers of man to God above. Still I perceived that in some way it was connected with the Christian Christ; and that the Father and the Spirit and Christ were in some permanent relation to each other and to man, by which relation man and God were drawn together. And this led me back again to the words, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” and “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”

Comparing this “love” with the friendship felt by the Epictetian Diogenes for the whole human race, I found the latter thin and poor. The Greek philosopher, being a “friend” of the Father of Gods and men, seemed to me to be friendly to men in the region (so to speak) of the Logos, “because”—I was disposed to add—“the Logos within him, in a ‘logical’ way, commanded him to be friendly to them, for consistency’s sake, as being ‘logically’ akin to him.” Perhaps some reaction against the constant inculcation of loyalty to the Logos during the last few weeks led me to be a little unfair to the Epictetian ideal. But, fair or unfair, these were my thoughts at the moment, while I was turning over the letters addressed by this wandering Jewish Diogenes to some of the principal cities of Greece and Asia, coming every now and then on such sentences as these: “I have strength for all things in Him that giveth me inward power”: “Being made powerful with all power, in accordance with the might of His glory, so that we rejoice in endurance and longsuffering, being thankful to the Father”: “Be ye made powerful in the Lord and in the might of His strength.” Here I noted that he did not say (as Epictetus did) “take power from yourselves.” Moreover Paul added “Put on the panoply of God.” Then I turned back again to the Roman and Corinthian letters; and still the same thoughts and phrases met me, about “power” in various contexts, such as “demonstration of Spirit and power,” and “abounding in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” “Love,” too, was represented as an irresistible power. “The love of Christ constraineth us,” he said. And then he added, “One died for all” and “He died for all, that the living should be living no longer to themselves, but to Him that for their sake died and was raised up from death.”

There was a great deal in this Roman letter that was almost total darkness to me at first. The references to Abraham—and, still more, those to Adam, coming abruptly in the phrases, “death reigned from Adam,” and “the transgression of Adam”—perplexed me a great deal till I perceived that the Jews fixed their hopes on God’s promise to their forefather Abraham, just as Romans—if they believed Virgil—might fix theirs on the forefather of the Julian race. As Æneas was the divine son of Anchises, so Isaac, by promise, was the divinely given son of Abraham. Paul, I thought, might draw a parallel between our Æneas and his Isaac, as though both were receivers of divine promises of empire extending over all the nations of the earth. At this Jewish fancy (so I called it) I remember smiling at the time, and quoting Virgil from a Jew’s point of view:

“Tantæ molis erat Judæam condere gentem.”

But I soon perceived, not only that Paul was in serious earnest, quite as much as Virgil, but also that his scheme, or dream, of universal empire for the seed of Abraham was compatible with the fact of universal empire for the seed of Anchises. Rome, the new Troy, claimed dominion over nothing but men’s bodies. The new Jerusalem claimed it over men’s souls.

I did not fully take all this into my mind till I had read the story of Abraham and Isaac in the scriptures, as I shall describe later on. But, with Virgil’s help, and Roman traditions, I partially understood it even now; and I remember asking myself, “If Virgil were now alive, would he be as sanguine as this Jew? Is not Rome on the wane? Ever since the Emperor cried to Varus, ‘Give me back my legions!’ have we not had qualms of fear lest we should be beaten back by the barbarians? Do not even the wisest of our rulers say, ‘Let us draw the line here. Let us conquer no more’? But this Jew sets no limits to his conquests. His projects may be mad. But at least he has some basis of fact for them. If he has conquered so far, why not further?”

As to “the transgression of Adam,” I remained longer in the dark. But I perceived from other passages in the epistles (and from the Jewish scriptures soon afterwards) that the story of Adam and Eve resembled some versions that I had read of the story of Epimetheus and Pandora, who caused sins and pains to come into the world, but “hope” came with them. Adam and Eve did the same. But Paul believed that the “hope” sprang from a promise of a higher and nobler life than would have been possible if Adam and Eve had never gone wrong. I took this for a mere legend, but a legend that might represent the will of Zeus—namely, that man should not stand still, but that he should go on growing, from age to age, in righteousness, which, as Plato says, is the attribute of man that makes him most like God.

Thus I was led on to higher and higher inferences about Paul’s “power.” First, it was real power, attested by facts—facts visible in great cities of Europe and Asia. In the next place, this power was based on faith and hope. Lastly, this faith and this hope—although they extended to everything in heaven and earth (since everything was to be bettered, purified, drawn onward or upward to what Plato might call its idea in God, that is, its perfection)—were themselves based on Christ, as having once died, but now being alive for ever in heaven.

But not only in heaven. For Paul seemed to think of Christ as also still perpetually present with, and in, his disciples on earth. Socrates in the Phædo says “As soon as I have drunk this poison I shall be no longer remaining among you, but shall be off at once to the isles of the blessed.” But Paul spoke of Christ’s love, and spirit, and of Christ himself, as still remaining amongst his followers. I knew that the common people think of Hercules as descending from heaven now and then to do a man a good turn; and at this I had always been disposed to laugh. But Paul’s view of Christ as being always in heaven, and yet also always on earth, among, or in the hearts of, those who loved him—this seemed to me more noble and more credible; though I did not believe it.

Now I was to be led a step further. For while I was repeating Paul’s words “one died for all,” and again, “one died,” it occurred to me “Yes, but he does not say how he died. Is he ashamed to speak of the shamefulness of the death, the slave’s death, death upon the cross?” So I looked through the Roman letter, right to the end, and I could find no mention of the “cross” or of “crucifying.” But in the very next column, where the first Corinthian letter began, I found this passage: “Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the Gospel, not in wisdom of ‘logos’ (i.e. word), lest the cross of Christ should be emptied of its power. For as to the ‘logos’ of the cross, to those indeed who are going the way of destruction, it is folly: but to us, who are going the way of salvation, it is the power of God. For it is written:

‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise

And the subtlety of the subtle will I bring to naught.’

Where is the ‘wise’? Where is the learned writer? Where is the ‘subtle’ discusser and disputer of this present age?”

Then followed some very difficult words: “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the Cosmos? For since, in the wisdom of God, the Cosmos, through that wisdom, recognised not God, God decreed through the foolishness of the proclamation of the gospel to save them that go the way of belief: for indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek after wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified; to the Jews, a stumbling block; to the other nations, a folly; but, to the called and summoned—Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

I have translated this literally so as to leave it as obscure to the reader as it was to me when I first read it. Even when I had read it over two or three times, there was a great deal that I could not understand. But it appeared to me to be ironical. It suggested that the “logos” of God may be different from the “logos” of men, or at all events, the “logos” of Greek philosophers. I had for some time been drawing near to a belief that “logos” might include feeling as well as reason. But this strange contrast between the unwise “wisdom of logos” and the wise “logos of the cross” came upon me as (possibly) a new revelation. As for the saying “the Greeks seek wisdom,” it reminded me how Epictetus used to deride the man of mere logic, words without deeds, the futile spinner of syllogisms. “Epictetus,” I said to myself, “would agree with this accusation.” But then I reflected that Paul would perhaps class Epictetus himself among these futile Greeks; and had not my Master himself confessed that the Jew, by mere force of “pathos,” outclassed the Greek in resolution and steadfastness, although the latter was backed by “logos”? The conclusion fell upon me, like a blow, “Here is Paul boasting as a conqueror what my Master confesses as a man conquered! Both agree that the ‘feeling’ of the Jew is more powerful in producing courage than the ‘reasonableness’ of the Greek!”

I did not like this turn of things. But I was intensely interested in it; and it quite decided me to continue the investigation. The question turned on “logos” and I quoted to myself Plato’s precept, “Follow the logos.” Epictetus made much of “logos.” Well, I would “follow the ‘logos,’” in its fullest sense, and would try to find out whether it did, or did not, indicate that “feeling,” as well as “reason,” may help us towards the knowledge of God. Dawn was appearing when I rolled up the little volume and placed it in my cabinet by the side of Scaurus’s sealed note with WORDS OF CHRISTUS on it. That reminded me of my old friend. What would he think of all this?

I sat down at once and wrote to him that I had not opened his note. If I ever did, it would be, I said, because I accepted his verdict. Epictetus really did seem to have borrowed from Paul. The subject was very interesting to me from a historical as well as a literary point of view; and I hoped he would not think it waste of time if I investigated it a little further. At the same time, I sent a note to Flaccus. Æmilius Scaurus, I said, had sent me some “words of Christus” extracted from Christian books, and I desired to receive the books themselves. As for the “scriptures” from which Paul so frequently quoted in their Greek form, I knew that I should have no difficulty in procuring copies of all or most of them from Sosia. This I resolved to do on the morrow, or rather in the day that was now dawning. It was not a lecture-day. Even if it had been, in the mood in which I then was, I should have thought a lecture or two might be profitably missed.

CHAPTER VII
DAVID AND MOSES

The Greek translation of the Scriptures shewn me by Sosia was in several volumes of various sizes and in various conditions. Unrolling the one that shewed most signs of use, I found that, although it was in prose, it was a translation of Hebrew poems, mostly very short, and of a lyrical character. One of them had in its title the name of “David,” which I had met with in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Sosia told me that he was the greatest of the ancient kings of the Jews. Ordering the other volumes to be sent to my rooms, I took this back with me, and began to read it immediately, beginning with the poem on which I had chanced in the shop.

It was a prayer for purification from sin: “Pity me, O God, according to thy great pity, and according to the multitude of thy compassions blot out my transgression. Cleanse me still more from my crime, and purify me from my sin.” So far, the poem was intelligible to me. I was familiar with the religious rites of cleansing from blood-guiltiness—mentioned in connexion with Orestes and many others by the Greek poets and recognised in various forms all over the world. So I said, “This king has committed homicide. He has been purified with lustral rites and sacrifices. But he needs some further rites: ‘Cleanse me still more,’ he says. The poem will tell me, I suppose, what more he needs.”

After adding some words to the effect that the transgression was against God, against God alone, the king continued, “For behold, in transgressions was I created at birth, and in sins did my mother conceive me. For behold, thou hast ever loved truth; thou hast shewn unto me the hidden secrets of thy wisdom. Thou wilt sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be purified; thou wilt wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” Here I was at a stand. It seemed to me a great and sudden descent to a depth of superstition, to suppose that this particular additional rite of “cleansing with hyssop” could satisfy the king’s conscience. Moreover I thought that “wisdom” must mean the wisdom of the Greeks. It was not till afterwards that I discovered how great a gulf separates our syllogistic or rhetorical or logical “wisdom” from that of the Jews—which means “knowledge of the righteousness of the Creator based upon reverence.” Thence comes their saying, “Reverence for God is the beginning of wisdom.”

These two misunderstandings almost led me to put down the book in disgust. But the passionateness of the king’s prayer made me read its opening words once again. Then I felt sure I must have done him injustice. So I read on. Presently I came to the words, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy countenance, and take not thy holy spirit from me.” These made me ashamed of having taken “hyssop” literally. I saw now that it was just as much metaphorical as “whiter than snow,” and that it meant a deep and inward purification—of the heart, not of the body. Still more was I ashamed when I came to the words, “If thou hadst delight in sacrifice I would have given it to thee, but thou wilt take no pleasure in whole burnt-offerings. The sacrifice for God is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart God will not despise.”

This was all new and strange doctrine to me. The graceful lines of Horace about the efficacy of the simplest sacrifice—of meal and salt—from the hand of an innocent country girl, and about its superiority to the proffered bribe of a hecatomb from a man of guilt, these I knew by heart; but they did not touch the present question, which was as to how the man of guilt could receive purification, without a hecatomb, without the blood of bulls and goats. And the question went even beyond that. For the king said that he had been “in sins” even from the beginning, even before birth. Did he speak of himself alone, or of himself as the type of erring mankind? I thought the latter. He seemed to me to say, “Man is from the first an animal, born to follow appetite. In part (no doubt) he is a divine being, born to follow the divine will; but in part he is an animal, born to follow animal propensity.” So far this agreed with Epictetus’s doctrine about the Beast. The Beast, at the beginning, tyrannizes over the divine Man, so that the human being may be said to be in sin—and indeed is in sin, as soon as he becomes conscious of the tyranny within him. “No lustral rites, no blood of bulls and goats,” the king seemed to say, “can purify this human heart of mine now that it has been tainted and corrupted by submitting to the Beast within me. A moment ago, my prayer was ‘Purge me with hyssop,’ but now it is ‘Destroy me and create me anew,’ ‘Take away my old heart and give me a new heart.’”

These last words were quite contrary to the doctrine of Epictetus, who taught us that we are to receive strength and righteousness from that which is within our own hearts. And, thought I, is not the king’s prayer superstitious? The witches in Rome suppose they can draw down the moon by incantations. This king David in Judæa supposes he can draw down “a clean heart” and “a right spirit” by passionate invocation to the God of the Jews! Are not the two superstitions parallel? Would not Epictetus say so? Would not all the Cynics say so? I thought they would: and, as I was rolling up the little book, I said, “It is a fine and passionate poem, but the prayer is not one for a philosopher.” Then, however, it occurred to me that there was a true and a deep philosophy—though I knew not of what school—in the doctrine that the true and purifying sacrifice for guilt is a penitent heart. That set me pondering the whole matter again and reflecting on some of the things in my own life of which I was most ashamed, things that I would have given much to forget, and a great deal more to undo. In the end, I found myself thinking—not saying, but thinking of it as a possible prayer—“In me, in me, too, create a clean heart, O thou God of forgiveness!” It might not be a prayer for philosophers, but I could not help feeling that it might be a good prayer for me.

While I was placing my new volume by the side of Paul’s epistles it occurred to me that the words I had just been reading might throw some light on a passage in the epistle to the Romans at which I had glanced last night. Then I could make nothing of it. Now I read it again: “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing. To will [that which is good] is present with me, but to do is not present. I will to do good and I do it not. I will not to do evil, and I do it.” This now seemed to me a truer description of the state of things (within me at all events) than the view mostly presented to us in our lecture-room. Epictetus often talked as though we had merely to will, and then what we willed—at least so far as concerns the mind and the things in the mind’s province—would at once come to pass. True, he did not always say this. Sometimes he insisted on the need of training or practice, and then he likened the Cynic to an athlete preparing for the Olympian games. But it seemed to me that he habitually underrated the difficulty of conforming the human to the divine will: and he never—never even once, as far as I know—recognised the need or efficacy of repentant sorrow.

My immediate conclusion was that, although it was not for me to decide between the “feeling” of the Jews and the “reason” of the Greeks in general, yet one thing was certain—I had a good deal to learn from the former. So I welcomed the arrival of Sosia’s servant bringing the rest of my new books. A good many of them I unrolled and cursorily inspected at once. Both from their number, and from the variety of their subjects, it was clear that I should only be able to study a few. I resolved to confine myself to such parts as bore on Paul’s epistles, and to dispense with lectures for a day or two. Then it occurred to me that Arrian, who had proposed to resume to-day our conversation on the Jews and Galilæans, might come in at any moment. I put away the Jewish books and went to his lodging, thinking that I could perhaps tell my friend of my new studies in order to explain to him my non-attendance at lecture. Instead of Arrian, however, I found a note informing me that he had been obliged to go suddenly to Corinth (in connexion with some business of his father’s) but hoped to return before long.