THE HIBBERT LECTURES
1888

The Hibbert Trustees cannot add this volume to their series without a few lines of grateful acknowledgment. It is impossible to forget either the courteous readiness with which the accomplished author undertook the task originally, or the admirable qualities he brought to it. When he died without completing the MS. for the press, the anxiety of the Trustees was at once relieved by the kind effort of his family to obtain adequate assistance. The public will learn from the Preface how much had to be done, and will join the Trustees in grateful appreciation of the services of the gentlemen who responded to the occasion. That Dr. Hatch’s friend, Dr. Fairbairn, consented to edit the volume, with the valuable aid of Mr. Bartlet and Professor Sanday, was an ample pledge that the want would be most efficiently met. To those gentlemen the Trustees are greatly indebted for the learned and earnest care with which the laborious revision was made.

THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1888.

THE
INFLUENCE OF GREEK IDEAS
AND USAGES
UPON THE
CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

BY THE LATE
EDWIN HATCH, D.D.
READER IN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.

EDITED BY
A. M. FAIRBAIRN, D.D.
LATE PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD.

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.
1914.

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

PREFACE.

The fittest introduction to these Lectures will be a few words of explanation.

Before his death, Dr. Hatch had written out and sent to press the first eight Lectures. Of these he had corrected six, while the proofs of the seventh and eighth, with some corrections in his own hand, were found among his papers. As regards these two, the duties of the editor were simple: he had only to correct them for the press. But as regards the remaining four Lectures, the work was much more arduous and responsible. A continuous MS., or even a connected outline of any one of the Lectures, could not be said to exist. The Lectures had indeed been delivered a year and a half before, but the delivery had been as it were of selected passages, with the connections orally supplied, while the Lecturer did not always follow the order of his notes, or, as we know from the Lectures he himself prepared for the press, the one into which he meant to work his finished material. What came into the editor’s hands was a series of note-books, which seemed at first sight but an amorphous mass or collection of hurried and disconnected jottings, now in ink, now in pencil; with a multitude of cross references made by symbols and abbreviations whose very significance had to be laboriously learned; with abrupt beginnings and still more abrupt endings; with pages crowded with successive strata, as it were, of reflections and references, followed by pages almost or entirely blank, speaking of sections or fields meant to be further explored; with an equal multitude of erasures, now complete, now incomplete, now cancelled; with passages marked as transposed or as to be transposed, or with a sign of interrogation which indicated, now a suspicion as to the validity or accuracy of a statement, now a simple suspense of judgment, now a doubt as to position or relevance, now a simple query as of one asking, Have I not said this, or something like this, before? In a word, what we had were the note-books of the scholar and the literary workman, well ordered, perhaps, as a garden to him who made it and had the clue to it, but at once a wilderness and a labyrinth to him who had no hand in its making, and who had to discover the way through it and out of it by research and experiment. But patient, and, I will add, loving and sympathetic work, rewarded the editor and his kind helpers. The clue was found, the work proved more connected and continuous than under the conditions could have been thought to be possible, and the result is now presented to the world.

A considerable proportion of the material for the ninth Lecture had been carefully elaborated; but some of it, and the whole of the material for the other three, was in the state just described. This of course added even more to the responsibilities than to the labours of the editor. In the body of the Lectures most scrupulous care has been taken to preserve the author’s ipsissima verba, and, wherever possible, the structure and form of his sentences. But from the very necessities of the case, the hand had now and then to be allowed a little more freedom; connecting words, headings, and even here and there a transitional sentence or explanatory clause, had to be added; but in no single instance has a word, phrase or sentence been inserted in the text without warrant from some one part or another of these crowded note-books. With the foot-notes it has been different. One of our earliest and most serious difficulties was to find whence many of the quotations, especially in the ninth Lecture, came. The author’s name was given, but often no clue to the book or chapter. We have been, I think, in every case successful in tracing the quotation to its source. Another difficulty was to connect the various references with the paragraph, sentence or statement, each was meant to prove. This involved a new labour; the sources had to be consulted alike for the purposes of verification and determination of relevance and place. The references, too, in the note-books were often of the briefest, given, as it were, in algebraics, and they had frequently to be expanded and corrected; while the search into the originals led now to the making of excerpts, and now to the discovery of new authorities which it seemed a pity not to use. As a result, the notes to Lecture IX. are mainly the author’s, though all as verified by other hands; but the notes to Lecture X., and in part also XI., are largely the editor’s. This is stated in order that all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies may be laid at the proper door. It seemed to the editor that, while he could do little to make the text what the author would have made it if it had been by his own hand prepared for the press, he was bound, in the region where the state of the MSS. made a discreet use of freedom not only possible but compulsory, to make the book as little unworthy of the scholarship and scrupulous accuracy of the author as it was in his power to do.

The pleasant duty remains of thanking two friends who have greatly lightened my labours. The first is Vernon Bartlet, M.A.; the second, Professor Sanday. Mr. Bartlet’s part has been the heaviest; without him the work could never have been done. He laboured at the MSS. till the broken sentences became whole, and the disconnected paragraphs wove themselves together; and then he transcribed the black and bewildering pages into clear and legible copy for the printer. He had heard the Lectures, and had happily taken a few notes, which, supplemented from other sources, proved most helpful, especially in the way of determining the order to be followed. He has indeed been in every way a most unwearied and diligent co-worker. To him we also owe the Synopsis of Contents and the Index. Professor Sanday has kindly read over all the Lectures that have passed under the hands of the editor, and has furnished him with most helpful criticisms, suggestions, and emendations.

The work is sent out with a sad gratitude. I am grateful that it has been possible so far to fulfil the author’s design, but sad because he no longer lives to serve the cause he loved so well. This is not the place to say a word either in criticism or in praise of him or his work. Those of us who knew him know how little a book like this expresses his whole mind, or represents all that in this field he had it in him to do.

The book is an admirable illustration of his method; in order to be judged aright, it ought to be judged within the limits he himself has drawn. It is a study in historical development, an analysis of some of the formal factors that conditioned a given process and determined a given result; but it deals throughout solely with these formal factors and the historical conditions under which they operated. He never intended to discover or discuss the transcendental causes of the process on the one hand, or to pronounce on the value or validity of the result on the other. His purpose, like his method, was scientific; and as an attempt at the scientific treatment of the growth and formulation of ideas, of the evolution and establishment of usages within the Christian Church, it ought to be studied and criticised. Behind and beneath his analytical method was a constructive intellect, and beyond his conclusions was a positive and co-ordinating conception of the largest and noblest order. To his mind every species of mechanical Deism was alien; and if his method bears hardly upon the traditions and assumptions by which such a Deism still lives in the region of early ecclesiastical history, it was only that he might prepare the way for the coming of a faith and a society that should be worthier of the Master he loved and the Church he served.

A. M. Fairbairn.

Oxford, July, 1890.

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS.

Lecture I.
INTRODUCTORY.

It is impossible for any one, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.

The contrast is patent. If any one thinks that it is sufficiently explained by saying that the one is a sermon and the other a creed, it must be pointed out in reply that the question why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and a metaphysical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century, is a problem which claims investigation.

It claims investigation, but it has not yet been investigated. There have been inquiries, which in some cases have arrived at positive results, as to the causes of particular changes or developments in Christianity—the development, for example, of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the theory of a Catholic Church. But the main question to which I invite your attention is antecedent to all such inquiries. It asks, not how did the Christian societies come to believe one proposition rather than another, but how did they come to the frame of mind which attached importance to either the one or the other, and made the assent to the one rather than the other a condition of membership.

In investigating this problem, the first point that is obvious to an inquirer is, that the change in the centre of gravity from conduct to belief is coincident with the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil. The presumption is that it was the result of Greek influence. It will appear from the Lectures which follow that this presumption is true. Their general subject is, consequently, The Influence of Greece upon Christianity.

The difficulty, the interest, and the importance of the subject make it incumbent upon us to approach it with caution. It is necessary to bear many points in mind as we enter upon it; and I will begin by asking your attention to two considerations, which, being true of all analogous phenomena of religious development and change, may be presumed to be true of the particular phenomena before us.

1. The first is, that the religion of a given race at a given time is relative to the whole mental attitude of that time. It is impossible to separate the religious phenomena from the other phenomena, in the same way that you can separate a vein of silver from the rock in which it is embedded. They are as much determined by the general characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of a geographical area are determined by its soil, its climate, and its cultivation; and they vary with the changing characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of the tertiary system differ from those of the chalk. They are separable from the whole mass of phenomena, not in fact, but only in thought. We may concentrate our attention chiefly upon them, but they still remain part of the whole complex life of the time, and they cannot be understood except in relation to that life. If any one hesitates to accept this historical induction, I will ask him to take the instance that lies nearest to him, and to consider how he could understand the religious phenomena of our own country in our own time—its doubts, its hopes, its varied enterprises, its shifting enthusiasms, its noise, its learning, its estheticism, and its philanthropies—unless he took account of the growth of the inductive sciences and the mechanical arts, of the expansion of literature, of the social stress, of the commercial activity, of the general drift of society towards its own improvement.

In dealing, therefore, with the problem before us, we must endeavour to realize to ourselves the whole mental attitude of the Greek world in the first three centuries of our era. We must take account of the breadth and depth of its education, of the many currents of its philosophy, of its love of literature, of its scepticism and its mysticism. We must gather together whatever evidence we can find, not determining the existence or measuring the extent of drifts of thought by their literary expression, but taking note also of the testimony of the monuments of art and history, of paintings and sculptures, of inscriptions and laws. In doing so, we must be content, at any rate for the present and until the problem has been more fully elaborated, with the broader features both of the Greek world and of the early centuries. The distinctions which the precise study of history requires us to draw between the state of thought of Greece proper and that of Asia Minor, and between the age of the Antonines and that of the Severi, are not necessary for our immediate purpose, and may be left to the minuter research which has hardly yet begun.

2. The second consideration is, that no permanent change takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs and usages of that race. The truth which Aristotle enunciated, that all intellectual teaching is based upon what is previously known to the person taught,[1] is applicable to a race as well as to an individual, and to beliefs even more than to knowledge. A religious change is, like a physiological change, of the nature of assimilation by, and absorption into, existing elements. The religion which our Lord preached was rooted in Judaism. It came “not to destroy, but to fulfil.” It took the Jewish conception of a Father in heaven, and gave it a new meaning. It took existing moral precepts, and gave them a new application. The meaning and the application had already been anticipated in some degree by the Jewish prophets. There were Jewish minds which had been ripening for them; and so far as they were ripe for them, they received them. In a similar way we shall find that the Greek Christianity of the fourth century was rooted in Hellenism. The Greek minds which had been ripening for Christianity had absorbed new ideas and new motives; but there was a continuity between their present and their past; the new ideas and new motives mingled with the waters of existing currents; and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.

The method of the investigation, like that of all investigations, must be determined by the nature of the evidence. The special feature of the evidence which affects the method is, that it is ample in regard to the causes, and ample also in regard to the effects, but scanty in regard to the process of change.

We have ample evidence in regard to the state of Greek thought during the ante-Nicene period. The writers shine with a dim and pallid light when put side by side with the master-spirits of the Attic age; but their lesser importance in the scale of genius rather adds to than diminishes from their importance as representatives. They were more the children of their time. They are consequently better evidence as to the currents of its thought than men who supremely transcended it. I will mention those from whom we shall derive most information, in the hope that you will in course of time become familiar, not only with their names, but also with their works. Dio of Prusa, commonly known as Dio Chrysostom, “Dio of the golden mouth,” who was raised above the class of travelling orators to which he belonged, not only by his singular literary skill, but also by the nobility of his character and the vigour of his protests against political unrighteousness. Epictetus, the lame slave, the Socrates of his time, in whom the morality and the religion of the Greek world find their sublimest expression, and whose conversations and lectures at Nicopolis, taken down, probably in short-hand, by a faithful pupil, reflect exactly, as in a photograph, the interior life of a great moralist’s school. Plutarch, the prolific essayist and diligent encyclopædist, whose materials are far more valuable to us than the edifices which he erects with them. Maximus of Tyre, the eloquent preacher, in whom the cold metaphysics of the Academy are transmuted into a glowing mysticism. Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher, in whose mind the fragments of many philosophies are lit by hope or darkened by despair, as the clouds float and drift in uncertain sunlight or in gathered gloom before the clearing rain. Lucian, the satirist and wit, the prose Aristophanes of later Greece. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings—or the collection of writings gathered under his name—are the richest of all mines for the investigation of later Greek philosophy. Philostratus, the author of a great religious romance, and of many sketches of the lives of contemporary teachers. It will hardly be an anachronism if we add to these the great syncretist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria; for, on the one hand, he was more Greek than Jew, and, on the other, several of the works which are gathered together under his name seem to belong to a generation subsequent to his own, and to be the only survivors of the Judæo-Greek schools which lasted on in the great cities of the empire until the verge of Christian times.

We have ample evidence also as to the state of Christian thought in the post-Nicene period. The Fathers Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem, the decrees of general and local Councils, the apocryphal and pseudonymous literature, enable us to form a clear conception of the change which Greek influences had wrought.

But the evidence as to the mode in which the causes operated within the Christian sphere before the final effects were produced is singularly imperfect. If we look at the literature of the schools of thought which ultimately became dominant, we find that it consists for the most part of some accidental survivals.[2] It tells us about some parts of the Christian world, but not about others. It represents a few phases of thought with adequate fulness, and of others it presents only a few fossils. In regard to Palestine, which in the third and fourth centuries was a great centre of culture, we have only the evidence of Justin Martyr. In regard to Asia Minor, which seems to have been the chief crucible for the alchemy of transmutation, we have but such scanty fragments as those of Melito and Gregory of Neocæsarea. The largest and most important monuments are those of Alexandria, the works of Clement and Origen, which represent a stage of singular interest in the process of philosophical development. Of the Italian writers, we have little that is genuine besides Hippolytus. Of Gallican writers, we have chiefly Irenæus, whose results are important as being the earliest formulating of the opinions which ultimately became dominant, but whose method is mainly interesting as an example of the dreary polemics of the rhetorical schools. Of African writers, we have Tertullian, a skilled lawyer, who would in modern times have taken high rank as a pleader at the bar or as a leader of Parliamentary debate; and Cyprian, who survives chiefly as a champion of the sacerdotal hypothesis, and whose vigorous personality gave him a moral influence which was far beyond the measure of his intellectual powers. The evidence is not only imperfect, but also insufficient in relation to the effects that were produced. Writers of the stamp of Justin and Irenæus are wholly inadequate to account for either the conversion of the educated world to Christianity, or for the forms which Christianity assumed when the educated world had moulded it.

And if we look for the literature of the schools of thought which were ultimately branded as heretical, we look almost wholly in vain. What the earliest Christian philosophers thought, we know, with comparatively insignificant exceptions, only from the writings of their opponents. They were subject to a double hate—that of the heathen schools which they had left, and that of the Christians who were saying “Non possumus” to philosophy.[3] The little trust that we can place in the accounts which their opponents give of them is shown by the wide differences in those accounts. Each opponent, with the dialectical skill which was common at the time, selected, paraphrased, distorted, and re-combined the points which seemed to him to be weakest. The result is, naturally, that the accounts which the several opponents give are so different in form and feature as to be irreconcilable with one another.[4] It was so also with the heathen opponents of Christianity.[5] With one important exception, we cannot tell how the new religion struck a dispassionate outside observer, or why it was that it left so many philosophers outside its fold. Then, as now, the forces of human nature were at work. The tendency to disparage and suppress an opponent is not peculiar to the early ages of Christianity. When the associated Christian communities won at length their hard-fought battle, they burned the enemy’s camp.

This fact of the scantiness and inadequacy of the evidence as to the process of transformation has led to two results which constitute difficulties and dangers in our path.

1. The one is the tendency to overrate the value of the evidence that has survived. When only two or three monuments of a great movement remain, it is difficult to appreciate the degree in which those monuments are representative. We tend at almost all times to attach an exaggerated importance to individual writers; the writers who have moulded the thoughts of their contemporaries, instead of being moulded by them, are always few in number and exceptional. We tend also to attach an undue importance to phrases which occur in such writers; few, if any, writers write with the precision of a legal document, and the inverted pyramids which have been built upon chance phrases of Clement or Justin are monuments of caution which we shall do well to keep before our eyes.

2. The other is the tendency to under-estimate the importance of the opinions that have disappeared from sight, or which we know only in the form and to the extent of their quotation by their opponents. If we were to trust the histories that are commonly current, we should believe that there was from the first a body of doctrine of which certain writers were the recognized exponents; and that outside this body of doctrine there was only the play of more or less insignificant opinions, like a fitful guerilla warfare on the flanks of a great army. Whereas what we really find on examining the evidence is, that out of a mass of opinions which for a long time fought as equals upon equal ground, there was formed a vast alliance which was strong enough to shake off the extremes at once of conservatism and of speculation, but in which the speculation whose monuments have perished had no less a share than the conservatism of which some monuments have survived.

This survey of the nature of the evidence enables us to determine the method which we should follow. We can trace the causes and we can see the effects; but we have only scanty information as to the intermediate processes. If the evidence as to those processes existed in greater mass, if the writings of those who made the first tentative efforts to give to Christianity a Greek form had been preserved to us, it might have been possible to follow in order of time and country the influence of the several groups of ideas upon the several groups of Christians. This method has been attempted, with questionable success, by some of those who have investigated the history of particular doctrines. But it is impossible to deprecate too strongly the habit of erecting theories upon historical quicksands; and I propose to pursue the surer path to which the nature of the evidence points, by stating the causes, by viewing them in relation to the effects, and by considering how far they were adequate in respect of both mass and complexity to produce those effects.

There is a consideration in favour of this method which is in entire harmony with that which arises from the nature of the evidence. It is, that the changes that took place were gradual and at first hardly perceptible. It would probably be impossible, even if we were in possession of ampler evidence, to assign a definite cause and a definite date for the introduction of each separate idea. For the early years of Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our lives. It has sometimes been thought that those early years are the most important years in the education of all of us. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and struggle and innocent mistakes, to use our eyes and our ears, to measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our maturity. We are helped in doing go, to an incalculable degree, by the accumulated experience of mankind which is stored up in language; but the growth is our own, the unconscious development of our own powers. It was in some such unconscious way that the Christian thought of the earlier centuries gradually acquired the form which we find when it emerges, as it were, into the developed manhood of the fourth century. Greek philosophy helped its development, as language helps a child; but the assimilation of it can no more be traced from year to year than the growth of the body can be traced from day to day.

We shall begin, therefore, by looking at the several groups of facts of the age in which Christianity grew, and endeavour, when we have looked at them, to estimate their influence upon it.

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of education: we shall find that it was an age that was penetrated with culture, and that necessarily gave to all ideas which it absorbed a cultured and, so to speak, scholastic form.

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of literature: we shall find that it was an age of great literary activity, which was proud of its ancient monuments, and which spent a large part of its industry in endeavouring to interpret and to imitate them.

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of philosophy: we shall find that it was an age in which metaphysical conceptions had come to occupy relatively the same place which the conceptions of natural science occupy among ourselves; and that just as we tend to look upon external things in their chemical and physical relations, so there was then, as it were, a chemistry and physics of ideas.

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of moral ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which the ethical forces of human nature were struggling with an altogether unprecedented force against the degradation of contemporary society and contemporary religion, and in which the ethical instincts were creating the new ideal of “following God,” and were solving the old question whether there was or was not an art of life by practising self-discipline.

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of theological ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which men were feeling after God and not feeling in vain, and that from the domains of ethics, physics, metaphysics alike, from the depths of the moral consciousness, and from the cloud-lands of poets’ dreams, the ideas of men were trooping in one vast host to proclaim with a united voice that there are not many gods, but only One, one First Cause by whom all things were made, one Moral Governor whose providence was over all His works, one Supreme Being “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.”

We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of religion: we shall find that it was an age in which the beliefs that had for centuries been evolving themselves from the old religions were showing themselves in new forms of worship and new conceptions of what God needed in the worshipper; in which also the older animalism was passing into mysticism, and mysticism was the preparation of the soul for the spiritual religion of the time to come.

We shall then, in the case of each great group of ideas, endeavour to ascertain from the earliest Christian documents the original Christian ideas upon which they acted; and then compare the later with the earlier form of those Christian ideas; and finally examine the combined result of all the influences that were at work upon the mental attitude of the Christian world and upon the basis of Christian association.

I should be glad if I could at once proceed to examine some of these groups of facts. But since the object which I have in view is not so much to lead you to any conclusions of my own, as to invite you to walk with me in comparatively untrodden paths, and to urge those of you who have leisure for historical investigations to explore them for yourselves more fully than I have been able to do—and since the main difficulties of the investigation lie less in the facts themselves than in the attitude of mind in which they are approached—I feel that I should fail of my purpose if I did not linger still upon the threshold to say something of the “personal equation” that we must make before we can become either accurate observers or impartial judges. There is the more reason for doing so, because the study of Christian history is no doubt discredited by the dissonance in the voices of its exponents. An ill-informed writer may state almost any propositions he pleases, with the certainty of finding listeners; a well-informed writer may state propositions which are as demonstrably true as any historical proposition can be, with the certainty of being contradicted. There is no court of appeal, nor will there be until more than one generation has been engaged upon the task to which I am inviting you.

1. In the first place, it is necessary to take account of the demand which the study makes upon the attention and the imagination of the student. The scientific, that is the accurate, study of history is comparatively new. The minute care which is required in the examination of the evidence for the facts, and the painful caution which is required in the forming of inferences, are but inadequately appreciated. The study requires not only attention, but also imagination. A student must have something analogous to the power of a dramatist before he can realize the scenery of a vanished age, or watch, as in a moving panorama, the series and sequence of its events. He must have that power in a still greater degree before he can so throw himself into a bygone time as to be able to enter into the motives of the actors, and to imagine how, having such and such a character, and surrounded by such and such circumstances, he would himself have thought and felt and acted. But the greatest demand that can be made upon either the attention or the imagination of a student is that which is made by such a problem as the present, which requires us to realize the attitude of mind, not of one man, but of a generation of men, to move with their movements, to float upon the current of their thoughts, and to pass with them from one attitude of mind into another.

2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of, for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of conclusions already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it.

We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece.

We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations, the sacred memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings, these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most resolutely to have abandoned them.

We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations which have come to us through our education. The ideas with which we have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early centuries of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries before. The terms are the same, but their meaning is different. Those of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which, until we consciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled.

We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by others. We have in those inductions so many moulds, so to speak, into which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only the provisional conclusions of earlier generations of scholars, and stages in our own historical education; and we arrange facts in the categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our inquiries have to solve.

3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends to be unconscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind, which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments of other generations increases in proportion as those generations recede from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental scenery round them. Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them. Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of our own; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative.

I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances:

(a) We tend to take with us, as we travel into bygone times, the dualistic hypothesis—which to most of us is no hypothesis, but an axiomatic truth—of the existence of an unbridged chasm between body and soul, matter and spirit. The relation in our minds of the idea of matter to the idea of spirit is such, that though we readily conceive matter to act upon matter, and spirit upon spirit, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive a direct action either of matter upon spirit or of spirit upon matter. When, therefore, in studying, for example, the ancient rites of baptism, we find expressions which seem to attribute a virtue to the material element, we measure such expressions by a modern standard, and regard them as containing only an analogy or a symbol. They belong, in reality, to another phase of thought than our own. They are an outflow of the earlier conception of matter and spirit as varying forms of a single substance.[6] “Whatever acts, is body,” it was said. Mind is the subtlest form of body, but it is body nevertheless. The conception of a direct action of the one upon the other presented no difficulty. It was imagined, for instance, that demons might be the direct causes of diseases, because the extreme tenuity of their substance enabled them to enter, and to exercise a malignant influence upon, the bodies of men. So water, when exorcized from all the evil influences which might reside in it, actually cleansed the soul.[7] The conception of the process as symbolical came with the growth of later ideas of the relation of matter to spirit. It is, so to speak, a rationalizing explanation of a conception which the world was tending to outgrow.

(b) We take with us in our travels into the past the underlying conception of religion as a personal bond between God and the individual soul. We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in which the conscience has no place. We can understand, however much we may deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because they ultimately rest upon the same conception: men were so profoundly convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately persecuted Christianity. The difficulty arises from our overlooking the entirely different aspect under which religion presented itself to a Roman mind. It was a matter which lay, not between the soul and God, but between the individual and the State. Conscience had no place in it. Worship was an ancestral usage which the State sanctioned and enforced. It was one of the ordinary duties of life.[8] The neglect of it, and still more the disavowal of it, was a crime. An emperor might pity the offender for his obstinacy, but he must necessarily either compel him to obey or punish him for disobedience.

It is not until we have thus realized the fact that the study of history requires as diligent and as constant an exercise of the mental powers as any of the physical sciences, and until we have made what may be called the “personal equation,” disentangling ourselves as far as we can from the theories which we have inherited or formed, and recognizing the existence of under-currents of thought in past ages widely different from those which flow in our own, that we shall be likely to investigate with success the great problem that lies before us. I lay stress upon these points, because the interest of the subject tends to obscure its difficulties. Literature is full of fancy sketches of early Christianity; they are written, for the most part, by enthusiasts whose imagination soars by an easy flight to the mountain-tops which the historian can only reach by a long and rugged road; they are read, for the most part, by those who give them only the attention which they would give to a shilling hand-book or to an article in a review. I have no desire, and I am sure that you have no desire, to add one more to such fancy sketches. The time has come for a precise study. The materials for such a study are available. The method of such a study is determined by canons which have been established in analogous fields of research. The difficulties of such a study come almost entirely from ourselves, and it is a duty to begin by recognizing them.

For the study is one not only of living interest, but also of supreme importance. Other history may be more or less antiquarian. Its ultimate result may be only to gratify our curiosity and to add to the stores of our knowledge. But Christianity claims to be a present guide of our lives. It has been so large a factor in the moral development of our race, that we cannot set aside its claim unheard. Neither can we admit it until we know what Christianity is. A thousand dissonant voices are each of them professing to speak in its name. The appeal lies from them to its documents and to its history. In order to know what it is, we must first know both what it professed to be and what it has been. The study of the one is the complement of the other; but it is with the latter only that we have at present to do. We may enter upon the study with confidence, because it is a scientific inquiry. We may hear, if we will, the solemn tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to conquest. It is marching in our day, almost for the first time, into the domain of Christian history. Upon its flanks, as upon the flanks of the physical sciences, there are scouts and skirmishers, who venture sometimes into morasses where there is no foothold, and into ravines from which there is no issue. But the science is marching on. “Vestigia nulla retrorsum.” It marches, as the physical sciences have marched, with the firm tread of certainty. It meets, as the physical sciences have met, with opposition, and even with contumely. In front of it, as in front of the physical sciences, is chaos; behind it is order. We may march in its progress, not only with the confidence of scientific certainty, but also with the confidence of Christian faith. It may show some things to be derived which we thought to be original; and some things to be compound which we thought to be incapable of analysis; and some things to be phantoms which we thought to be realities. But it will add a new chapter to Christian apologetics; it will confirm the divinity of Christianity by showing it to be in harmony with all else that we believe to be divine; its results will take their place among those truths which burn in the souls of men with a fire that cannot be quenched, and light up the darkness of this stormy sea with a light that is never dim.

Lecture II.
GREEK EDUCATION.

The general result of the considerations to which I have already invited your attention is, that a study of the growth and modifications of the early forms of Christianity must begin with a study of their environment. For a complete study, it would be necessary to examine that environment as a whole. In some respects all life hangs together, and no single element of it is in absolute isolation. The political and economical features of a given time affect more or less remotely its literary and philosophical features, and a complete investigation would take them all into account. But since life is short, and human powers are limited, it is necessary in this, as in many other studies, to be content with something less than ideal completeness. It will be found sufficient in practice to deal only with the proximate causes of the phenomena into which we inquire; and in dealing, as we shall mainly do, with literary effects, to deal also mainly with those features of the age which were literary also.

The most general summary of those features is, that the Greek world of the second and third centuries was, in a sense which, though not without some just demur, has tended to prevail ever since, an educated world. It was reaping the harvest which many generations had sown. Five centuries before, the new elements of knowledge and cultured speech had begun to enter largely into the simpler elements of early Greek life. It had become no longer enough for men to till the ground, or to pursue their several handicrafts, or to be practised in the use of arms. The word σοφός, which in earlier times had been applied to one who was skilled in any of the arts of life, who could string a bow or tune a lyre or even trim a hedge, had come to be applied, if not exclusively, yet at least chiefly, to one who was shrewd with practical wisdom, or who knew the thoughts and sayings of the ancients. The original reasons, which lay deep in the Greek character, for the element of knowledge assuming this special form, had been accentuated by the circumstances of later Greek history. There seems to be little reason in the nature of things why Greece should not have anticipated modern Europe in the study of nature, and why knowledge should not have had for its chief meaning in earlier times that which it is tending to mean now, the knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the physical world. The tendency to collect and colligate and compare the facts of nature appears to be no less instinctive than the tendency to become acquainted with the thoughts of those who have gone before us. But Greece on the one hand had lost political power, and on the other hand possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage. She could acquiesce with the greater equanimity in political subjection, because in the domain of letters she was still supreme with an indisputable supremacy. It was natural that she should turn to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon speech. For the love of speech had become to a large proportion of Greeks a second nature. They were a nation of talkers. They were almost the slaves of cultivated expression. Though the public life out of which orators had grown had passed away with political freedom, it had left behind it a habit which in the second century of our era was blossoming into a new spring. Like children playing at “make-believe,” when real speeches in real assemblies became impossible, the Greeks revived the old practice of public speaking by addressing fictitious assemblies and arguing in fictitious courts. In the absence of the distractions of either keen political struggles at home or wars abroad, these tendencies had spread themselves over the large surface of general Greek society. A kind of literary instinct had come to exist. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.

Two points have to be considered in regard to that education before it can be regarded as a cause in relation to the main subject which we are examining: we must look first at its forms, and secondly at its mass. It is not enough that it should have corresponded in kind to certain effects; it must be shown to have been adequate in amount to account for them.

I. The education was almost as complex as our own. If we except only the inductive physical sciences, it covered the same field. It was, indeed, not so much analogous to our own as the cause of it. Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the whole civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths.

The two main elements were those which have been already indicated, Grammar and Rhetoric.[9]

1. By Grammar was meant the study of literature.[10] In its original sense of the art of reading and writing, it began as early as that art begins among ourselves. “We are given over to Grammar,” says Sextus Empiricus,[11] “from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes.” But this elementary part of it was usually designated by another name,[12] and Grammar itself had come to include all that in later times has been designated Belles Lettres. This comprehensive view of it was of slow growth; consequently, the art is variously defined and divided. The division which Sextus Empiricus[13] speaks of as most free from objection, and which will sufficiently indicate the general limits of the subject, is into the technical, the historical, and the exegetical elements. The first of these was the study of diction, the laying down of canons of correctness, the distinction between Hellenisms and Barbarisms. Upon this as much stress was laid as was laid upon academic French in the age of Boileau. “I owe to Alexander,” says Marcus Aurelius,[14] “my habit of not finding fault, and of not using abusive language to those who utter a barbarous or awkward or unmusical phrase.” “I must apologize for the style of this letter,” says the Christian Father Basil two centuries afterwards, in writing to his old teacher Libanius; “the truth is, I have been in the company of Moses and Elias, and men of that kind, who tell us no doubt what is true, but in a barbarous dialect, so that your instructions have quite gone out of my head.”[15] The second element of Grammar was the study of the antiquities of an author: the explanation of the names of the gods and heroes, the legends and histories, which were mentioned. It is continued to this day in most notes upon classical authors. The third element was partly critical, the distinguishing between true and spurious treatises, or between true and false readings; but chiefly exegetical, the explanation of an author’s meaning. It is spoken of as the prophetess of the poets,[16] standing to them in the same relation as the Delphian priestess to her inspiring god.

The main subject-matter of this literary education was the poets. They were read, not only for their literary, but also for their moral value.[17] They were read as we read the Bible. They were committed to memory. The minds of men were saturated with them. A quotation from Homer or from a tragic poet was apposite on all occasions and in every kind of society. Dio Chrysostom, in an account of his travels, tells how he came to the Greek colony of the Borysthenitæ, on the farthest borders of the empire, and found that even in those remote settlements almost all the inhabitants knew the Iliad by heart, and that they did not care to hear about anything else.[18]

2. Grammar was succeeded by Rhetoric—the study of literature by the study of literary expression and quasi-forensic argument. The two were not sharply distinguished in practice, and had some elements in common. The conception of the one no less than of the other had widened with time, and Rhetoric, like Grammar, was variously defined and divided. It was taught partly by precept, partly by example, and partly by practice. The professor either dictated rules and gave lists of selected passages of ancient authors, or he read such passages with comments upon the style, or he delivered model speeches of his own. The first of these methods has its literary monument in the hand-books which remain.[19] The second survives as an institution in modern times, and on a large scale, in the University “lecture,” and it has also left important literary monuments in the Scholia upon Homer and other great writers. The third method gave birth to an institution which also survives in modern times. Each of these methods was followed by the student. He began by committing to memory both the professor’s rules and also selected passages of good authors: the latter he recited, with appropriate modulations and gestures, in the presence of the professor. In the next stage, he made his comments upon them. Here is a short example which is embedded in Epictetus:[20] the student reads the first sentence of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and makes his criticism upon it:

“‘I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on which....’

Rather ... ‘the ground on which....’ It is neater.”

From this, or concurrently with this, the student proceeded to compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was gradually led to invent the structure as well as the style of what he wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he had the use of the professor’s library;[21] and though writing in his native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted, just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he recited a prepared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. “You must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped round you,” says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his boat, “and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you will make my boat too heavy).”[22]

To a considerable extent there prevailed, in addition to Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philosophy. It was the highest element in the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt to argue: a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of Philosophy and the outlines of its history. Lucian[23] tells a tale of a country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture night after night, and regaled his mother and himself with fallacies and dilemmas, talking about “relations” and “comprehensions” and “mental presentations,” and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying, “that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones and such-like.” As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp-witted people conducted under recognized rules. But it was a comparatively new phase of Philosophy that it should have a literary side. It had shared in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand. It was not the evolution of a man’s own thoughts, but an acquaintance with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught in the same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it; sometimes he gave a discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor, and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness of the reasoning or the interpretation.[24] The Discourses of Epictetus have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for they are in great measure notes of such lectures, and form, as it were, a photograph of a philosopher’s lecture-room.

Against this degradation of Philosophy, not only the Cynics, but almost all the more serious philosophers protested. Though Epictetus himself was a professor, and though he followed the current usages of professorial teaching, his life and teaching alike were in rebellion against it. “If I study Philosophy,” he says, “with a view only to its literature, I am not a philosopher, but a littérateur; the only difference is, that I interpret Chrysippus instead of Homer.”[25] They sometimes protested not only against the degradation of Philosophy, but also against the whole conception of literary education. “There are two kinds of education,” says Dio Chrysostom,[26] “the one divine, the other human; the divine is great and powerful and easy; the human is mean and weak, and has many dangers and no small deceitfulness. The mass of people call it education (παιδείαν), as being, I suppose, an amusement (παιδίαν), and think that a man who knows most literature—Persian and Greek and Syrian and Phœenician—is the wisest and best-educated man; and then, on the other hand, when they find a man of this sort to be vicious and cowardly and fond of money, they think the education to be as worthless as the man himself. The other kind they call sometimes education, and sometimes manliness and high-mindedness. It was thus that the men of old used to call those who had this good kind of education—men with manly souls, and educated as Herakles was—sons of God.” And not less significant as an indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: “I owe it to Rusticus,” he says,[27] “that I formed the idea of the need of moral reformation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations ... and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and foppery of speech.”

II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are shown by many kinds of evidence.

1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of “private tutors” in the houses of the great families. It entered public life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town. At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say, from school to a University.[28] The students who so went away from home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were very poor, and, like the “bettelstudenten” of the mediæval Universities, had sometimes to beg their bread.[29] “You are a miserable race,” says Epictetus[30] to some students of this kind; “when you have eaten your fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow’s dinner will come from.” Some of them went because it was the fashion. The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad, and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and “society” hardly existed.[31] Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them any good.[32] Then, as now, they went from the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre; “and the consequence is,” says Epictetus,[33] “that you don’t get out of your old habits or make moral progress.” Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the “alderman” who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.[34] And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. “You should sit upright,” says Plutarch,[35] in his advice to hearers in general, “not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker.” In a similar way Philo,[36] also speaking of hearers in general, says: “Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects—family affairs, other people’s affairs, private affairs, ... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not.”

2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers,[37] who might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.

The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens.

(a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic Rhetoric.[38]

(b) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment.[39] They exempted those whom they affected from all the burdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift from the municipality of a considerable annual income.

3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were not only a recognized class; they also mingled largely, by virtue of their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pretensions were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Rhetoric to speak upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of Philosophy to read a discourse upon morals. A “sermonette” from one of these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us.[40] All three kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a great household. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became “domestic chaplains.”[41] They were sometimes, indeed, singularly like the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in his essay “On Persons who give their Society for Pay,” has some amusing vignettes of their life. One is of a philosopher who has to accompany his patroness on a tour: he is put into a waggon with the cook and the lady’s-maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in to ease his limbs against the jolting.[42] Another is of a philosopher who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial favour, “You are so very kind and careful: will you take my lapdog into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want for anything?”[43] Another is of a philosopher who has to discourse on temperance while his lady is having her hair braided: her maid comes in with a billet-doux, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until she has written an answer to her lover.[44] Another is of a philosopher who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is meanwhile waiting to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems to do him no good.[45] It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth in his frequent caricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following is his picture of Thrasycles:[46]

“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure: then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation, until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”

4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent survival. It might be maintained that the prominence which is given to them in literature, their endowment by the State, and their social influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and our own time.

Two things especially have come:

(i.) The place which literature holds in general education. We educate our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch of the mediæval trivium, which was itself a continuation of the Greek habit which has been described above.

(ii.) The other point, though less important in itself, is even more important as indicating the strength of the Greek educational system. It is that we retain still its technical terms and many of its scholastic usages, either in their original Greek form or as translated into Latin and modified by Latin habits, in the schools of the West.

The designation “professor” comes to us from the Greek sophists, who drew their pupils by promises: to “profess” was to “promise,” and to promise was the characteristic of the class of teachers with whom in the fourth century B.C. Greek education began. The title lost its original force, and became the general designation of a public teacher, superseding the special titles, “philosopher,” “sophist,” “rhetorician,” “grammarian,” and ending by being the synonym of “doctor.”[47]

The practice of lecturing, that is of giving instruction by reading an ancient author, with longer or shorter comments upon his meaning, comes to us from the schools in which a passage of Homer or Plato or Chrysippus was read and explained. The “lecture” was probably in the first instance a student’s exercise: the function of the teacher was to make remarks or to give his judgment upon the explanation that was given: it was not so much legere as prælegere, whence the existing title of “prælector.”[48]

The use of the word “chair” to designate the teacher’s office, and of the word “faculty” to denote the branch of knowledge which he teaches, are similar survivals of Greek terms.[49]

The use of academical designations as titles is also Greek: it was written upon a man’s tombstone that he was “philosopher” or “sophist,” “grammarian” or “rhetorician,” as in later times he would be designated M.A. or D.D.[50] The most interesting of these designations is that of “sophist.” The long academical history of the word only ceased at Oxford a few years ago, when the clauses relating to “sophistæ generales” were erased as obsolete from the statute-book.

The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man’s qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a “Regius Professor;”[51] but in the case of others of those professors, the nomination was in the hands of “the best and oldest and wisest in the city,” that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some have thought, a special Board.[52] Elsewhere, and apparently without exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of municipal affairs.[53] The authority which conferred the right might also take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence withdrawn.[54] The testing of qualifications preceded the admission to office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of congé d’élire from the Emperor;[55] but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate’s giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor’s representative or the City Council.[56] It was the small beginning of that system of “examination” which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the “examiners,” just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a “grand compounder” might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.[57] In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by putting on the student’s gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress.[58]

The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating the strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them.[59] They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century; they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called “the Benedictine era,”[60] without special nurture and without literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots.

This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its effect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated—a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality—a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream.

Lecture III.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS.

Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them an importance and an impressiveness which did not attach to any spoken words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own. Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked or obscured.

In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two other feelings.

The one was the reverence for antiquity. The voice of the past sounded with a fuller note than that of the present. It came from the age of the heroes who had become divinities. It expressed the national legends and the current mythology, the primitive types of noble life and the simple maxims of awakening reflection, the “wisdom of the ancients,” which has sometimes itself taken the place of religion. The other was the belief in inspiration. With the glamour of writing was blended the glamour of rhythm and melody. When the gods spoke, they spoke in verse.[61] The poets sang under the impulse of a divine enthusiasm. It was a god who gave the words: the poet was but the interpreter.[62] The belief was not merely popular, but was found in the best minds of the imperial age. “Whatever wise and true words were spoken in the world about God and the universe, came into the souls of men not without the Divine will and intervention through the agency of divine and prophetic men.”[63] “To the poets sometimes, I mean the very ancient poets, there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, like a flash of light from an unseen fire.”[64]

The combination of these three feelings, the mystery of writing, the reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, tended to give the writings of the ancient poets a unique value. It lifted them above the common limitations of place and time and circumstance. The verses of Homer were not simply the utterances of a particular person with a particular meaning for a particular time. They had a universal validity. They were the voice of an undying wisdom. They were the Bible of the Greek races.[65]

When the unconscious imitation of heroic ideals passed into a conscious philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to speak, in terms of the current standards; and when, soon afterwards, the conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should be the basis of that education. Literature consisted, in effect, of the ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of them. “I consider,” says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name,[66] “that the chief part of a man’s education is to be skilled in epic poetry; and this means that he should be able to understand what the poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question is put to him.” The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he, too, was a “sophist,” and had aimed at educating men.[67] Homer was the common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics, and partly by the successors of the first sophists, who sharpened their wits by disputations as to Homer’s meaning, posing difficulties and solving them: of these disputations some relics survive in the Scholia, especially such as are based upon the Questions of Porphyry.[68] But in the first conception, literary and moral education had been inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature. Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature, could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so. For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new education was bringing in new conceptions of morals, Homer was a force which could easily be turned in new directions. All imaginative literature is plastic when it is used to enforce a moral; and the sophists could easily preach sermons of their own upon Homeric texts. There was no fixed traditional interpretation; and they were but following a current fashion in drawing their own meanings from him. He thus became a support, and not a rival. The Hippias Minor of Plato furnishes as pertinent instances as could be mentioned of this educational use of Homer.

The method lasted as long as Greek literature. It is found in full operation in the first centuries of our era. It was explicitly recognized, and most of the prominent writers of the time supply instances of its application. “In the childhood of the world,” says Strabo,[69] “men, like children, had to be taught by tales;” and Homer told tales with a moral purpose. “It has been contended,” he says again,[70] “that poetry was meant only to please:” on the contrary, the ancients looked upon poetry as a form of philosophy, introducing us early to the facts of life, and teaching us in a pleasant way the characters and feelings and actions of men. It was from Homer that moralists drew their ideals: it was his verses that were quoted, like verses of the Bible with us, to enforce moral truths. There is in Dio Chrysostom[71] a charming “imaginary conversation” between Philip and Alexander. “How is it,” said the father, “that Homer is the only poet you care for: there are others who ought not to be neglected?” “Because,” said the son, “it is not every kind of poetry, just as it is not every kind of dress, that is fitting for a king; and the poetry of Homer is the only poetry that I see to be truly noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one who will some day rule over men.” And Dio himself reads into Homer many a moral meaning. When, for example,[72] the poet speaks of the son of Kronos having given the staff and rights of a chief that he might take counsel for the people, he meant to imply that not all kings, but only those who have a special gift of God, had that staff and those rights, and that they had them, moreover, not for their own gratification, but for the general good; he meant, in fact, that no bad man can be a true master either of himself or of others—no, not if all the Greeks and all the barbarians join in calling him king.

It was not only the developing forms of ethics that were thus made to find a support in Homer, but all the varying theories of physics and metaphysics, one by one. The Heracliteans held, for example, that when Homer spoke of

“Ocean, the birth of gods, and Tethys their mother,”

he meant to say that all things are the offspring of flow and movement.[73] The Platonists held that when Zeus reminded Hera of the time when he had hung her trembling by a golden chain in the vast concave of heaven, it was God speaking to matter which he had taken and bound by the chains of laws.[74] The Stoics read into the poets so much Stoicism, that Cicero says, in good-humoured banter, that you would think the old poets, who had really no suspicion of such things, to have been Stoical philosophers.[75] Sometimes Homer was treated as a kind of encyclopædia. Xenophon, in his Banquet,[76] makes one of the speakers, who could repeat Homer by heart, say that “the wisest of mankind had written about almost all human things;” and there is a treatise by an unknown author of imperial times which endeavours to show in detail that he contains the beginning of every one of the later sciences, historical, philosophical, and political.[77] When he calls men deep-voiced and women high-voiced, he shows his knowledge of the distinctions of music. When he gives to each character its appropriate style of speech, he shows his knowledge of rhetoric. He is the father of political science, in having given examples of each of the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. He is the father of military science, in the information which he gives about tactics and siege-works. He knew and taught astronomy and medicine, gymnastics and surgery; “nor would a man be wrong if he were to say that he was a teacher of painting also.”

This indifference to the actual meaning of a writer, and the habit of reading him by the light of the reader’s own fancies, have a certain analogy in our own day in the feeling with which we sometimes regard other works of art. We stand before some great masterpiece of painting—the St. Cecilia or the Sistine Madonna—and are, as it were, carried off our feet by the wonder of it. We must be cold critics if we simply ask ourselves what Raffaelle meant by it. We interpret it by our own emotions. The picture speaks to us with a personal and individual voice. It links itself with a thousand memories of the past and a thousand dreams of the future. It translates us into another world—the world of a lost and impossible love, the dreamland of achieved aspirations, the tender and half-tearful heaven of forgiven sins: we are ready to believe, if only for a moment, that Raffaelle meant by it all that it means to us; and for what he did actually mean, we have but little care.

But these tendencies to draw a moral from all that Homer wrote, and to read philosophy into it, though common and permanent, were not universal. There was an instinct in the Greek mind, as there is in modern times, which rebelled against them. There were literalists who insisted that the words should be taken as they stood, and that some of the words as they stood were clearly immoral.[78] There were, on the other hand, apologists who said sometimes that Homer reflected faithfully the chequered lights and shadows of human life, and sometimes that the existence of immorality in Homer must clearly be allowed, but that if a balance were struck between the good and the evil, the good would be found largely to predominate.[79] There were other apologists who made a distinction between the divine and the human elements: the poets sometimes spoke, it was said, on their own account: some of their poetry was inspired, and some was not: the Muses sometimes left them: “and they may very properly be forgiven if, being men, they made mistakes when the divinity which spoke through their mouths had gone away from them.”[80]

But all these apologies were insufficient. The chasm between the older religion which was embodied in the poets, and the new ideas which were marching in steady progress away from the Homeric world, was widening day by day. A reconciliation had to be found which had deeper roots. It was found in a process of interpretation whose strength must be measured by its permanence. The process was based upon a natural tendency. The unseen working of the will which lies behind all voluntary actions, and the unseen working of thought which by an instinctive process causes some of those actions to be symbolical, led men in comparatively early times to find a meaning beneath the surface of a record or representation of actions. A narrative of actions, no less than the actions themselves, might be symbolical. It might contain a hidden meaning. Men who retained their reverence for Homer, or who at least were not prepared to break with the current belief in him, began to search for such meanings. They were assisted in doing so by the concomitant development of the “mysteries.” The mysteries were representations of passages in the history of the gods which, whatever their origin, had become symbolical. It is possible that no words of explanation were spoken in them; but they were, notwithstanding, habituating the Greek mind both to symbolical expression in general, and to the finding of physical or religious or moral truths in the representation of fantastic or even immoral actions.[81]

It is uncertain when this method of interpretation began to be applied to ancient literature. It was part of the general intellectual movement of the fifth century B.C. It is found in one of its forms in Hecatæus, who explained the story of Cerberus by the existence of a poisonous snake in a cavern on the headland of Tænaron.[82] It was elaborated by the sophists. It was deprecated by Plato. “If I disbelieved it,” he makes Socrates say,[83] in reference to the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, “as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; ... but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to deal with all such questions: and for my own part I cannot investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first Know myself.” Nor will he admit allegorical interpretation as a sufficient vindication of Homer:[84] “The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephæstus by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without them.” But the direct line of historical tradition of the method seems to begin with Anaxagoras and his school.[85] In Anaxagoras himself the allegory was probably ethical: he found in Homer a symbolical account of the movements of mental powers and moral virtues: Zeus was mind, Athené was art. But the method which, though it is found in germ among earlier or contemporary writers, seems to have been first formulated by his disciple Metrodorus, was not ethical but physical.[86] By a remarkable anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a survival of memories of an earlier religion, the Homeric stories were treated as a symbolical representation of physical phenomena. The gods were the powers of nature: their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces. The method had for many centuries an enormous hold upon the Greek mind; it lay beneath the whole theology of the Stoical schools; it was largely current among the scholars and critics of the early empire.[87]

Its most detailed exposition is contained in two writers, of both of whom so little is personally known that there is a division of opinion whether the name of the one was Heraclitus or Heraclides,[88] and of the other Cornutus or Phornutus;[89] but both were Stoics, both are most probably assigned to the early part of the first century of our era, and in both of them the physical is blended with an ethical interpretation.

1. Heraclitus begins by the definite avowal of his apologetic purpose. His work is a vindication of Homer from the charge of impiety. “He would unquestionably be impious if he were not allegorical;”[90] but as it is, “there is no stain of unholy fables in his words: they are pure and free from impiety.”[91] Apollo is the sun; the “far-darter” is the sun sending forth his rays: when it is said that Apollo slew men with his arrows, it is meant that there was a pestilence in the heat of summer-time.[92] Athené is thought: when it is said that Athené came to Telemachus, it is meant only that the young man then first began to reflect upon the waste and profligacy of the suitors: a thought, shaped like a wise old man, came, as it were, and sat by his side.[93] The story of Proteus and Eidothea is an allegory of the original formless matter taking many shapes:[94] the story of Ares and Aphrodite and Hephæstus is a picture of iron subdued by fire, and restored to its original hardness by Poseidon, that is by water.[95]

2. Cornutus writes in vindication not so much of the piety of the ancients as of their knowledge: they knew as much as men of later times, but they expressed it at greater length and by means of symbols. He rests his interpretation of those symbols to a large extent upon etymology. The science of religion was to him, as it has been to some persons in modern days, an extension of the science of philology. The following are examples: Hermes (from ἐρεῖν, “to speak”) is the power of speech which the gods sent from heaven as their peculiar and distinguishing gift to men. He is called the “conductor,” because speech conducts one man’s thought into his neighbour’s soul. He is the “bright-shiner,” because speech makes dark things clear. His winged feet are the symbols of “winged words.” He is the “leader of souls,” because words soothe the soul to rest; and the “awakener from sleep,” because words rouse men to action. The serpents twined round his staff are a symbol of the savage natures that are calmed by words, and their discords gathered into harmony.[96] The story of Prometheus (“forethought”), who made a man from clay, is an allegory of the providence and forethought of the universe: he is said to have stolen fire, because it was the forethought of men found out its use: he is said to have stolen it from heaven, because it came down in a lightning-flash: and his being chained to a rock is a picture of the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to the painful necessities of physical life, its liver gnawed at unceasingly by petty cares.[97]

Two other examples of the method may be given from later writers, to show the variety of its application.

The one is from Sallust, a writer of the fourth century of our era. He thus explains the story of the judgment of Paris. The banquet of the gods is a picture of the vast supra-mundane Powers, who are always in each other’s society. The apple is the world, which is thrown from the banquet by Discord, because the world itself is the play of opposing forces; and different qualities are given to the world by different Powers, each trying to win the world for itself; and Paris is the soul in its sensuous life, which sees not the other Powers in the world, but only Beauty, and says that the world is the property of Love.[98]

The other is from a writer of a late but uncertain age. He deals only with the Odyssey. Its hero is the picture of a man who is tossed upon the sea of life, drifted this way and that by adverse winds of fortune and of passion: the companions who were lost among the Lotophagi are pictures of men who are caught by the baits of pleasure and do not return to reason as their guide: the Sirens are the pleasures that tempt and allure all men who pass over the sea of life, and against which the only counter-charm is to fill one’s senses and powers of mind full of divine words and actions, as Odysseus filled his ears with wax, that, no part of them being left empty, pleasure may knock at their doors in vain.[99]

The method survived as a literary habit long after its original purpose failed. The mythology which it had been designed to vindicate passed from the sphere of religion into that of literature; but in so passing, it took with it the method to which it had given rise. The habit of trying to find an arrière pensée beneath a man’s actual words had become so inveterate, that all great writers without distinction were treated as writers of riddles. The literary class insisted that their functions were needed as interpreters, and that a plain man could not know what a great writer meant. “The use of symbolical speech,” said Didymus, the great grammarian of the Augustan age, “is characteristic of the wise man, and the explanation of its meaning.”[100] Even Thucydides is said by his biographer to have purposely made his style obscure that he might not be accessible except to the truly wise.[101] It tended to become a fixed idea in the minds of many men that religious truth especially must be wrapped up in symbol, and that symbol must contain religious truth. The idea has so far descended to the present day, that there are, even now, persons who think that a truth which is obscurely stated is more worthy of respect, and more likely to be divine, than a truth which “he that runs may read.”

The same kind of difficulty which had been felt on a large scale in the Greek world in regard to Homer, was felt in no less a degree by those Jews who had become students of Greek philosophy in regard to their own sacred books. The Pentateuch, in a higher sense than Homer, was regarded as having been written under the inspiration of God. It, no less than Homer, was so inwrought into the minds of men that it could not be set aside. It, no less than Homer, contained some things which, at least on the surface, seemed inconsistent with morality. To it, no less than to Homer, was applicable the theory that the words were the veils of a hidden meaning. The application fulfilled a double purpose: it enabled educated Jews, on the one hand, to reconcile their own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral religion, and, on the other hand, to show to the educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous, nor unmeaning, nor immoral. It may be conjectured that, just as in Greece proper the adoption of the allegorical method had been helped by the existence of the mysteries, so in Egypt it was helped by the large use in earlier times of hieroglyphic writing, the monuments of which were all around them, though the writing itself had ceased.[102]

The earliest Jewish writer of this school of whom any remains have come down to us, is reputed to be Aristobulus (about B.C. 170-150).[103] In an exposition of the Pentateuch which he is said to have addressed to Ptolemy Philometor, he boldly claimed that, so far from the Mosaic writings being outside the sphere of philosophy, the Greek philosophers had taken their philosophy from them. “Moses,” he said, “using the figures of visible things, tells us the arrangements of nature and the constitutions of important matters.” The anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament were explained on this principle. The “hand” of God, for example, meant His power, His “feet,” the stability of the world.

But by far the most considerable monument of this mode of interpretation consists of the works of Philo. They are based throughout on the supposition of a hidden meaning. But they carry us into a new world. The hidden meaning is not physical, but metaphysical and spiritual. The seen is the veil of the unseen, a robe thrown over it which marks its contour, “and half conceals and half reveals the form within.”

It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11, “He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the commentary is:[104]

“The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical and physical meaning, but also because of their literal teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries, whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset them—I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which is the home of the soul—by immoderate eating and drinking, and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones, as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves, whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we find him asking only for nature’s wealth of food and raiment: he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who is at war with every kind of effeminacy.

“But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it.”

In all this, Philo was following not a Hebrew but a Greek method. He expressly speaks of it as the method of the Greek mysteries. He addresses his hearers by the name which was given to those who were being initiated. He bids them be purified before they listen. And in this way it was possible for him to be a Greek philosopher without ceasing to be a Jew.

The earliest methods of Christian exegesis were continuations of the methods which were common at the time to both Greek and Græco-Judæan writers. They were employed on the same subject-matter. Just as the Greek philosophers had found their philosophy in Homer, so Christian writers found in him Christian theology. When he represents Odysseus as saying,[105] “The rule of many is not good: let there be one ruler,” he means to indicate that there should be but one God; and his whole poem is designed to show the mischief that comes of having many gods.[106] When he tells us that Hephæstus represented on the shield of Achilles “the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed,”[107] he is teaching us the divine order of creation which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[108] So Clement of Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each other to mean the separation of land and sea;[109] and he holds that Homer, when he makes Apollo ask Achilles, “Why fruitlessly pursue him, a god,” meant to show that the divinity cannot be apprehended by the bodily powers.[110] Some of the philosophical schools which hung upon the skirts of Christianity mingled such interpretations of Greek mythology with similar interpretations of the Old Testament. For example, the writer to whom the name Simon Magus is given, is said to have “interpreted in whatever way he wished both the writings of Moses and also those of the (Greek) poets;”[111] and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[112] combined with the story of the garden of Eden.[113] But the main application was to the Old Testament exclusively. The reasons given for believing that the Old Testament had an allegorical meaning were precisely analogous to those which had been given in respect to Homer. There were many things in the Old Testament which jarred upon the nascent Christian consciousness. “Far be it from us to believe,” says the writer of the Clementine Homilies,[114] “that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, ‘tempts’ men as though He did not know—for who then does foreknow? and if He ‘repents,’ who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if He ‘hardens’ men’s hearts, who makes them wise? and if He ‘blinds’ them, who makes them to see? and if He desires ‘a fruitful hill,’ whose then are all things? and if He wants the savour of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if He delights in lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?”

One early answer to all such difficulties was, like a similar answer to difficulties about the Homeric mythology, that there was a human as well as a divine element in the Old Testament: some things in it were true, and some were false: and “this was indeed the very reason why the Master said, ‘Be genuine money-changers,’[115] testing the Scriptures like coins, and separating the good from the bad.” But the answer did not generally prevail. The more common solution, as also in the case of Homer, was that Moses had written in symbols in order to conceal his meaning from the unwise; and Clement of Alexandria, in an elaborate justification of this method, mentions as analogies not only the older Greek poetry, but also the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians.[116] The Old Testament thus came to be treated allegorically. A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretations were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians.[117] But the method was soon applied to new data. Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the Christian writers endeavoured to show that the writings of the Hebrew preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm, the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the Breath of God flowed in divine music into the souls of men.[118]

The prophets, even more than the poets, lent themselves easily to this allegorical method of interpretation. The nabi was in an especial sense the messenger of God and an interpreter of His will. But his message was often a parable. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He wrote, not in plain words, but in pictures. The meaning of the pictures was often purposely obscure. The Greek word “prophet” sometimes properly belonged, not to the nabi himself, but to those who, in his own time or in after time, explained the riddle of his message. When the message passed into literature, the interpretation of it became linked with the growing conception of the foreknowledge and providence of God: it was believed that He not only knew all things that should come to pass, but also communicated His knowledge to men. The nabi, through whom He revealed His will as to the present, was also the channel through whom He revealed His intention as to the future. The prophetic writings came to be read in the light of this conception. The interpreters wandered, as it were, along vast corridors whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs and paintings. They found in them symbols which might be interpreted of their own times. They went on to infer the divine ordering of the present from the coincidence of its features with features that could be traced in the hieroglyphs of the past. A similar conception prevailed in the heathen world. It lay beneath the many forms of divination. Hence Tertullian[119] speaks of Hebrew prophecy as a special form of divination, “divinatio prophetica.” So far from being strange to the Greek world, it was accepted. Those who read the Old Testament without accepting Christianity, found in its symbols prefigurings, not of Christianity, but of events recorded in the heathen mythologies. The Shiloh of Jacob’s song was a foretelling of Dionysus: the virgin’s son of Isaiah was a picture of Perseus: the Psalmist’s “strong as a giant to run his course” was a prophecy of Herakles.[120]

The fact that this was an accepted method of interpretation enabled the Apologists to use it with great effect. It became one of the chief evidences of Christianity. Explanations of the meaning of historical events and poetical figures which sound strange or impossible to modern ears, so far from sounding strange or impossible in the second century, carried conviction with them. When it was said, “The government shall be upon his shoulder,” it was meant that Christ should be extended on the cross;[121] when it was said, “He shall dip his garment in the blood of the grape,” it was meant that his blood should be, not of human origin, but, like the red juice of the grape, from God;[122] when it was said that “He shall receive the power of Damascus,” it was meant that the power of the evil demon who dwelt at Damascus should be overcome, and the prophecy was fulfilled when the Magi came to worship Christ.[123] The convergence of a large number of such interpretations upon the Gospel history was a powerful argument against both Jews and Greeks. I need not enlarge upon them. They have formed part of the general stock of Christian teaching ever since. But I will draw your attention to the fact that the basis of this use of the Old Testament was not so much the idea of prediction as the prevalent practice of treating ancient literature as symbolical or allegorical.

The method came to be applied to the books which were being formed into a new volume of sacred writings, side by side with the old. It was so applied, in the first instance, not by the Apologists, but by the Gnostics. It was detached from the idea of prediction. It was linked with the idea of knowledge as a secret. This extension of the method was inevitable. The earthly life of Christ presented as many difficulties to the first Christian philosophers as the Old Testament had done. The conception of Christ as the Wisdom and the Power of God seemed inconsistent with the meanness of a common human life; and that life resolved itself into a series of symbolic representations of superhuman movements, and the record of it was written in hieroglyphs. When Symeon took the young child in his arms and said the Nunc dimittis, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the Infinite Depth.[124] The raising of Jairus’ daughter was a type of Achamoth, the Eternal Wisdom, the mother of the Demiurge, whom the Saviour led anew to the perception of the light which had forsaken her. Even the passion on the Cross was a setting forth of the anguish and fear and perplexity of the Eternal Wisdom.[125]

The method was at first rejected with contumely. Irenæus and Tertullian bring to bear upon it their batteries of irony and denunciation. It was a blasphemous invention. It was one of the arts of spiritual wickedness against which a Christian must wrestle. But it was deep-seated in the habits of the time; and even while Tertullian was writing, it was establishing a lodgment inside the Christian communities which it has never ceased to hold. It did so first of all in the great school of Alexandria, in which it had grown up as the reconciliation of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. The methods of the school of Philo were applied to the New Testament even more than to the Old. When Christ said, “The foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head,” he meant that on the believer alone, who is separated from the rest, that is from the wild beasts of the world, rests the Head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word.[126] When he is said to have fed the multitude on five barley-loaves and two fishes, it is meant that he gave mankind the preparatory training of the Law, for barley, like the Law, ripens sooner than wheat, and of philosophy, which had grown, like fishes, in the waves of the Gentile world.[127] When we read of the anointing of Christ’s feet, we read of both his teaching and his passion; for the feet are a symbol of divine instruction travelling to the ends of the earth, or, it may be, of the Apostles who so travelled, having received the fragrant unction of the Holy Ghost; and the ointment, which is adulterated oil, is a symbol of the traitor Judas, “by whom the Lord was anointed on the feet, being released from his sojourn in the world: for the dead are anointed.”[128]

But it may reasonably be doubted whether the allegorical method would have obtained the place which it did in the Christian Church if it had not served an other than exegetical purpose. It is clear that after the first conflicts with Judaism had subsided, the Old Testament formed a great stumbling-block in the way of those who approached Christianity on its ideal side, and viewed it by the light of philosophical conceptions. Its anthropomorphisms, its improbabilities, the sanction which it seemed to give to immoralities, the dark picture which it sometimes presented of both God and the servants of God, seemed to many men to be irreconcilable with both the theology and the ethics of the Gospel. An important section of the Christian world rejected its authority altogether: it was the work, not of God, but of His rival, the god of this world: the contrast between the Old Testament and the New was part of the larger contrast between matter and spirit, darkness and light, evil and good.[129] Those who did not thus reject it were still conscious of its difficulties. There were many solutions of those difficulties. Among them was that which had been the Greek solution of analogous difficulties in Homer. It was adopted and elaborated by Origen expressly with an apologetic purpose. He had been trained in current methods of Greek interpretation. He is expressly said to have studied the books of Cornutus.[130] He found in the hypothesis of a spiritual meaning as complete a vindication of the Old Testament as Cornutus had found of the Greek mythology. The difficulties which men find, he tells us, arise from their lack of the spiritual sense. Without it he himself would have been a sceptic.

“What man of sense,” he asks,[131] “will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun and moon and stars? Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life, that might be seen and touched, so that one who tasted of the fruit by his bodily lips obtained life? or, again, that one was partaker of good and evil by eating that which was taken from a tree? And if God is said to have walked in a garden in the evening, and Adam to have hidden under a tree, I do not suppose that any one doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history being apparently but not literally true.... Nay, the Gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of narratives. Take, for example, the story of the devil taking Jesus up into a high mountain to show him from thence the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them: what thoughtful reader would not condemn those who teach that it was with the eye of the body—which needs a lofty height that even the near neighbourhood may be seen—that Jesus beheld the kingdoms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians, and Parthians, and the manner in which their rulers were glorified among men?”

The spirit intended, in all such narratives, on the one hand to reveal mysteries to the wise, on the other hand to conceal them from the multitude. The whole series of narratives is constructed with a purpose, and subordinated to the exposition of mysteries. Difficulties and impossibilities were introduced in order to prevent men from being drawn into adherence to the literal meaning. Sometimes the truth was told by means of a true narrative which yielded a mystical sense: sometimes, when no such narrative of a true history existed, one was invented for the purpose.[132]

In this way, as a rationalizing expedient for solving the difficulties of Old Testament exegesis, the allegorical method established for itself a place in the Christian Church: it largely helped to prevent the Old Testament from being discarded: and the conservation of the Old Testament was the conservation of allegory, not only for the Old Testament, but also for the New.

Against the whole tendency of symbolical interpretation there was more than one form of reaction in both the Greek and the Christian world.

1. It was attacked by the Apologists in its application to Greek mythology. With an inconsequence which is remarkable, though not singular, they found in it a weapon of both defence and offence. They used it in defence of Christianity, not only because it gave them the evidence of prediction, but also because it solved some of the difficulties which the Old Testament presented to philosophical minds. They used it, on the other hand, in their attack upon Greek religion. Allegories are an after-thought, they said sometimes, a mere pious gloss over unseemly fables.[133] Even if they were true, they said again, and the basis of Greek belief were as good as its interpreters alleged it to be, it was a work of wicked demons to wrap round it a veil of dishonourable fictions.[134] The myth and the god who is supposed to be behind it vanish together, says Tatian: if the myth be true, the gods are worthless demons; if the myth be not true, but only a symbol of the powers of nature, the godhead is gone, for the powers of nature are not gods since they constrain no worship.[135] In a similar way, in the fourth century, Eusebius treats it as a vain attempt of a younger generation to explain away (θεραπεῦσαι) the mistakes of their fathers.[136]

2. It was attacked by the Greek philosophers in its application to Christianity. There are some persons, says Porphyry,[137] who being anxious to find, not a way of being rid of the immorality of the Old Testament, but an explanation of it, have recourse to interpretations which do not hold together nor fit the words which they interpret, which serve not so much as a defence of Jewish doctrines as to bring approbation and credit for their own. It is a delusive evasion of your difficulties, said in effect Celsus;[138] you find in your sacred books narratives which shock your moral sense; you think that you get rid of the difficulty by having recourse to allegory; but you do not: in the first place, your scriptures do not admit of being so interpreted; in the second place, the explanation is often more difficult than the narrative which it explains. The answer of Origen is weak: it is partly a Tu quoque: Homer is worse than Genesis, and if allegory will not explain the latter, neither will it the former: it is partly that, if there had been no secret, the Psalmist would not have said, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of thy law.”

3. The method had opponents even in Alexandria itself. Origen[139] more than once speaks of those who objected to his “digging wells below the surface;” and Eusebius mentions a lost work of the learned Nepos of Arsinoê, entitled “A Refutation of the Allegorists.”[140] But it found its chief antagonist in the school of interpretation which arose at the end of the fourth century at Antioch. The dominant philosophy of Alexandria had been a fusion of Platonism with some elements of both Stoicism and revived Pythagoreanism: that of Antioch was coming to be Aristotelianism. The one was idealistic, the other realistic: the one was a philosophy of dreams and mystery, the other of logic and system: to the one, Revelation was but the earthy foothold from which speculation might soar into infinite space; to the other, it was “a positive fact given in the light of history.”[141] Allegorical interpretation was the outcome of the one; literal interpretation of the other. The precursor of the Antiochene school, Julius Africanus, of Emmaus, has left behind a letter which has been said “to contain in its two short pages more true exegesis than all the commentaries and homilies of Origen.”[142] The chief founder of the school was Lucian, a scholar who shares with Origen the honour of being the founder of Biblical philology, and whose lifetime, which was cut short by martyrdom in 311, just preceded the great Trinitarian controversies of the Nicene period. His disciples came to be leaders on the Arian side: among them were Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius himself. The question of exegesis became entangled with the question of orthodoxy. The greatest of Greek interpreters, Theodore of Mopsuestia, followed, a hundred years afterwards, in the same path; but in his day also questions of canons of interpretation were so entangled with questions of Christology, and the Christology of the Antiochene school was so completely outvoted at the great ecclesiastical assemblies by the Christology of the Alexandrian school, that his reputation for scholarship has been almost wholly obscured by the ill-fame of his leanings towards Nestorianism. It has been one of the many results of the controversies into which the metaphysical tendencies of the Greeks led the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries, to postpone almost to modern times the acceptance of “the literal grammatical and historical sense” as the true sense of Scripture.

The allegorical method of interpretation has survived the circumstances of its birth and the gathered forces of its opponents. It has filled a large place in the literature of Christianity. But by the irony of history, though it grew out of a tendency towards rationalism, it has come in later times to be vested like a saint, and to wear an aureole round its head. It has been the chief instrument by which the dominant beliefs of every age have constructed their strongholds.[143] It was harmless so long as it was free. It was the play of innocent imagination on the surface of great truths. But when it became authoritative, when the idea prevailed that only that poetical sense was true of which the majority approved, and when moreover it became traditional, so that one generation was bound to accept the symbolical interpretations of its predecessors, it became at once the slave of dogmatism and the tyrant of souls. Outside its relation to dogmatism, it has a history and a value which rather grow than diminish with time. It has given to literature books which, though of little value for the immediate purpose of interpretation, are yet monuments of noble and inspiring thoughts. It has contributed even more to art than to literature. The poetry of life would have been infinitely less rich without it. For though without it Dante might have been stirred to write, he would not have written the Divine Comedy; and though without it Raffaelle would have painted, he would not have painted the St. Cecilia; and though without it we should have had Gothic cathedrals, we should not have had that sublime symbolism of their structure which is of itself a religious education. It survives because it is based upon an element in human nature which is not likely to pass away: whatever be its value in relation to the literature of the past, it is at least the expression in relation to the present that our lives are hedged round by the unknown, that there is a haze about both our birth and our departure, and that even the meaner facts of life are linked to infinity.

But two modern beliefs militate against it.

1. The one belief affects all literature, religious and secular alike. It is that the thoughts of the past are relative to the past, and must be interpreted by it. The glamour of writing has passed away. A written word is no more than a spoken word; and a spoken word is taken in the sense in which the speaker used it, at the time at which he used it. There have been writers of enigmas and painters of emblems, but they have formed an infinitesimal minority. There have been those who, as Cicero says of himself in writing to Atticus, have written allegorically lest open speech should betray them; but such cryptograms have only a temporary and transient use. The idea that ancient literature consists of riddles which it is the business of modern literature to solve, has passed for ever away.

2. The other belief affects specially religious literature. It is that the Spirit of God has not yet ceased to speak to men, and that it is important for us to know, not only what He told the men of other days, but also what He tells us now. Interpretation is of the present as well as of the past. We can believe that there is a Divine voice, but we find it hard to believe that it has died away to an echo from the Judean hills. We can believe in religious as in other progress, but we find it hard to believe that that progress was suddenly arrested fifteen hundred years ago. The study of nature and the study of history have given us another maxim for religious conduct and another axiom of religious belief. They apply to that which is divine within us the inmost secret of our knowledge and mastery of that which is divine without us: man, the servant and interpreter of nature, is also, and is thereby, the servant and interpreter of the living God.

Lecture IV.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN RHETORIC.

It is customary to measure the literature of an age by its highest products, and to measure the literary excellence of one age as compared with that of another by the highest products of each of them. We look, for example, upon the Periclean age at Athens, or the Augustan age at Rome, or the Elizabethan age in our own country, as higher than the ages respectively of the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, or the early Georges. The former are “golden;” the latter, “silver.” Nor can it be doubted that from the point of view of literature in itself, as distinguished from literature in its relation to history or to social life, such a standard of measurement is correct. But the result of its application has been the doing of a certain kind of injustice to periods of history in which, though the high-water mark has been lower, there has been a wide diffusion of literary culture. This is the case with the period with which we are dealing. It produced no writer of the first rank. It was artificial rather than spontaneous. It was imitative more than original. It was appreciative rather than constructive. Its literature was born, not of the enthusiasm of free activity, but rather of the passivity which comes when there is no hope. But as to a student of science the after-glow is an object of study no less than the noon-day, so to a student of the historical development of the world the silver age of a nation’s literature is an object of study no less than its golden age.

Its most characteristic feature was one for which it is difficult to find any more exact description than the paradoxical phrase, “a viva-voce literature.” It had its birth and chief development in that part of the Empire in which Christianity and Greek life came into closest and most frequent contact. It was the product of the rhetorical schools which have been already described. In those schools the professor had been in the habit of illustrating his rules and instructing his students by model compositions of his own.[144] Such compositions were in the first instance exercises in the pleading of actual causes, and accusations or defences of real persons. The cases were necessarily supposed rather than actual, but they had a practical object in view, and came as close as possible to real life. The large growth of the habit of studying Rhetoric as a part of the education of a gentleman, and the increased devotion to the literature of the past, which came partly from the felt loss of spontaneity and partly from national pride,[145] caused these compositions in the rhetorical schools to take a wider range.[146] They began on the one hand to be divorced from even a fictitious connection with the law-courts, and on the other to be directly imitative of the styles of ancient authors. From the older Rhetoric, the study of forensic logic and speech with a view to the actual practice in the law-courts, which necessarily still went on, there branched out the new Rhetoric, which was sometimes specially known as Sophistic.

Sophistic proceeded for the most part upon the old lines. Its literary compositions preserved the old name, “exercises” (μελέται), as though they were still the rehearsals of actual pleadings. They were divided into two kinds, Theses and Hypotheses, according as a subject was argued in general terms or names were introduced.[147] The latter were the more common. Their subjects were sometimes fictitious, sometimes taken from real history. Of the first of these there is a good example in Lucian’s Tyrannicide: the situation is, that a man goes into the citadel of a town for the purpose of killing a tyrant: not finding the tyrant, the man kills the tyrant’s son: the tyrant coming in and seeing his son with the sword in his body, stabs himself: the man claims the reward as a tyrannicide. Of the second kind of subjects, there are such instances as “Demosthenes defending himself against the charge of having taken the bribe which Demades brought,”[148] and “The Athenians wounded at Syracuse beg their comrades who are returning to Athens to put them to death.”[149] The Homeric cycle was an unfailing mine of subjects: the Persian wars hardly less so. “Would you like to hear a sensible speech about Agamemnon, or are you sick of hearing speeches about Agamemnon, Atreus’ son?” asks Dio Chrysostom in one of his Dialogues.[150] “I should not take amiss even a speech about Adrastus or Tantalus or Pelops, if I were likely to get good from it,” is the polite reply. In the treatment of both kinds of subjects, stress was laid on dramatic consistency. The character, whether real or supposed, was required to speak in an appropriate style.[151] The “exercise” had to be recited with an appropriate intonation.[152] Sometimes the dramatic effect was heightened by the introduction of two or more characters: for example, one of the surviving pièces of Dio Chrysostom[153] consists of a wrangle in tragic style, and with tragic diction, between Odysseus and Philoctetes.

This kind of Sophistic has an interest in two respects, apart from its relation to contemporary life. It gave birth to the Greek romance, which is the progenitor of the mediæval romance and of the modern novel:[154] a notable example of such a sophistical romance in Christian literature is the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions; in non-Christian literature, Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana. It gave birth also to the writings in the style of ancient authors which, though commonly included in the collected works of those authors, betray their later origin by either the poverty of their thought or inadvertent neologisms of expression: for example, the Eryxias of Plato.[155]

But though Sophistic grew mainly out of Rhetoric, it had its roots also in Philosophy. It was sometimes defined as Rhetoric philosophizing.[156] It threw off altogether the fiction of a law-court or an assembly, and discussed in continuous speech the larger themes of morality or theology. Its utterances were not “exercises” but “discourses” (διαλέξεις).[157] It preached sermons. It created not only a new literature, but also a new profession. The class of men against whom Plato had inveighed had become merged in the general class of educators: they were specialized partly as grammarians, partly as rhetoricians: the word “sophist,” to which the invectives had failed to attach a permanent stigma, remained partly as a generic name, and partly as a special name for the new class of public talkers. They differed from philosophers in that they did not mark themselves off from the rest of the world, and profess their devotion to a higher standard of living, by wearing a special dress.[158] They were a notable feature of their time. Some of them had a fixed residence and gave discourses regularly, like the “stated minister” of a modern congregation: some of them travelled from place to place. The audience was usually gathered by invitation. There were no newspaper advertisements in those days, and no bells; consequently the invitations were personal. They were made sometimes by a “card” or “programme,” sometimes by word of mouth: “Come and hear me lecture to-day.”[159] Sometimes a messenger was sent round; sometimes the sophist would go round himself and knock at people’s doors and promise them a fine discourse.[160]

The audience of a travelling sophist was what might be expected among a people who lived very much out of doors. When a stranger appeared who was known by his professional dress, and whose reputation had preceded him, the people clustered round him—like iron filings sticking to a magnet, says Themistius.[161] If there was a resident sophist, the two were pitted together; just as if, in modern times, a famous violinist from Paris or Vienna might be asked to play at the next concert with the leading violinist in London. It was a matter not only of professional honour, but also of obligation. A man could not refuse. There is a story in Plutarch[162] about a sophist named Niger who found himself in a town in Galatia which had a resident professor. The resident made a discourse. Niger had, unfortunately, a fish-bone in his throat and could not easily speak; but he had either to speak or to lose his reputation: he spoke, and an inflammation set in which killed him. There is a much longer story in Philostratus[163] of Alexander Peloplato going to Athens to discourse in a friendly contest with Herodes Atticus. The audience gathered together in a theatre in the Ceramicus, and waited a long time for Herodes to appear: when he did not come, they grew angry and thought that it was a trick, and insisted on Alexander coming forward to discourse before Herodes arrived. And when Herodes did arrive, Alexander suddenly changed his style—sang tenor, so to speak, instead of bass—and Herodes followed him, and there was a charming interchange of compliments: “We sophists,” said Alexander, “are all of us only slices of you, Herodes.”

Sometimes they went to show their skill at one of the great festivals, such as that of Olympia. Lucian[164] tells a story of one who had plucked feathers from many orators to make a wonderful discourse about Pythagoras. His object was to gain the glory of delivering it as an extempore oration, and he arranged with a confederate that its subject should be the subject selected for him by the audience. But the imposture was too barefaced: some of the hearers amused themselves by assigning the different passages to their several authors; and the sophist himself at last joined in the universal laughter. And Dio Chrysostom[165] draws a picture of a public place at Corinth during the Isthmian games, which he alleges to be as true of the time of Diogenes as of his own: “You might hear many poor wretches of sophists shouting and abusing one another, and their disciples, as they call them, squabbling, and many writers of books reading their stupid compositions, and many poets singing their poems, and many jugglers exhibiting their marvels, and many soothsayers giving the meaning of prodigies, and ten thousand rhetoricians twisting law-suits, and no small number of traders driving their several trades.”

Of the manner of the ordinary discourse there are many indications. It was given sometimes in a private house, sometimes in a theatre, sometimes in a regular lecture-room. The professor sometimes entered already robed in his “pulpit-gown,” and sometimes put it on in the presence of his audience. He mounted the steps to his professorial chair, and took his seat upon its ample cushion.[166] He sometimes began with a preface, sometimes he proceeded at once to his discourse. He often gave the choice of a subject to his audience.[167] He was ready to discourse on any theme; and it was part of his art either to force the choice of a subject, or so to turn the subject as to bring in something which he had already prepared. “His memory is incredible,” says Pliny of Isæus; “he repeats by heart what he appears to say extempore; but he does not falter even in a single word.”[168] “When your audience have chosen a subject for you,” says Lucian,[169] in effect, in his satirical advice to rhetoricians, “go straight at it and say without hesitation whatever words come to your tongue, never minding about the first point coming first and the second second: the great thing is to go right on and not have any pauses. If you have to talk at Athens about adultery, bring in the customs of the Hindoos and Persians: above all, have passages about Marathon and Cynægirus—that is indispensable. And Athos must always be turned into sea, and the Hellespont into dry land, and the sun must be darkened by the clouds of Median arrows ... and Salamis and Artemisium and Platæa, and so forth, must come in pretty frequently; and, above all, those little Attic words I told you about must blossom on the surface of your speech—ἅττα (atta) and δήπουθεν (depouthen)—must be sprinkled about freely, whether they are wanted or not: for they are pretty words, even when they do not mean anything.”

It was a disappointment if he was not interrupted by applause. “A sophist is put out in an extempore speech,” says Philostratus,[170] “by a serious-looking audience and tardy praise and no clapping.” “They are all agape,” says Dio Chrysostom,[171] “for the murmur of the crowd ... like men walking in the dark, they move always in the direction of the clapping and the shouting.” “I want your praise,” said one of them to Epictetus.[172] “What do you mean by my praise?” asked the philosopher. “Oh, I want you to say Bravo! and Wonderful!” replied the sophist. These were the common cries; others were not infrequent—“Divine!” “Inspired!” “Unapproachable!”[173] They were accompanied by clapping of the hands and stamping of the feet and waving of the arms. “If your friends see you breaking down,” says Lucian in his satirical advice to a rhetorician,[174] “let them pay the price of the suppers you give them by stretching out their arms and giving you a chance of thinking of something to say in the interval between the rounds of applause.” Sometimes, of course, there were signs of disapproval. “It is the mark of a good hearer,” says Plutarch,[175] “that he does not howl out like a dog at everything of which he disapproves, but at any rate waits until the end of the discourse.”

After the discourse, the professor would go round: “‘What did you think of me to-day?’” says one in Epictetus.[176] “‘Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.’ ‘What did you think of my best passage?’ ‘Which was that?’ ‘Where I described Pan and the Nymphs.’ ‘Oh, it was excessively well done.’” Again, to quote another anecdote from Epictetus:[177] “‘A much larger audience to-day, I think,’ says the professor. ‘Yes: much larger.’ ‘Five hundred, I should guess.’ ‘Oh, nonsense; it could not have been less than a thousand.’ ‘Why that is more than Dio ever had: I wonder why it was: they appreciated what I said, too.’ ‘Beauty, sir, can move even a stone.’”

They made both money and reputation. The more eminent of them were among the most distinguished men of the time. They were the pets of society, and sometimes its masters.[178] They were employed on affairs of state at home and on embassies abroad.[179] They were sometimes placed on the free list of their city, and lived at the public expense. They were sometimes made senators—raised, as we might say, to the House of Lords—and sometimes governors of provinces.[180] When they died, and sometimes before their death, public statues were erected in their honour.[181] The inscriptions of some of them are recorded by historians, and some remain: “The Queen of Cities to the King of Eloquence,” was inscribed on the statue of Prohæresius at Rome.[182] “One of the Seven Wise Men, though he had not fulfilled twenty-five years,” is inscribed on an existing base of a statue at Attaleia;[183] and, beneath a representation of crowning, the words, “He subjects all things to eloquence,” are found on a similar base at Parion.[184]

They naturally sometimes gave themselves great airs. There are many stories about them. Philostratus tells one of the Emperor Antoninus Pius on arriving at Smyrna going, in accordance with imperial custom, to spend the night at the house which was at once the best house in the city and the house of the most distinguished man. It was that of the sophist Polemo, who happened on the Emperor’s arrival to be away from home; but he returned from his journey at night, and with loud exclamations against being kept out of his own, turned the Emperor out of doors.[185] The common epithet for them is ἀλαζών—a word with no precise English equivalent, denoting a cross between a braggart and a mountebank.

But the real grounds on which the more earnest men objected to them were those upon which Plato had objected to their predecessors: their making a trade of knowledge, and their unreality.

1. The making of discourses, whether literary or moral, was a thriving trade.[186] The fees given to a leading sophist were on the scale of those given to a prima donna in our own day.[187] But the objection to it was not so much the fact of its thriving, as the fact of its being a trade at all. “If they do what they do,” says Dio Chrysostom,[188] “as poets and rhetoricians, there is no harm perhaps; but if they do it as philosophers, for the sake of their own personal gain and glory, and not for the sake of benefiting you, there is harm.” The defence which Themistius[189] makes for himself is more candid than effective: “I do make money,” he says; “people give me sometimes one mina, sometimes two, sometimes as much as a talent: but, since I must speak about myself, let me ask you this—Did any one ever come away the worse for having heard me? Mark, I charge nothing: it is a voluntary contribution.”

2. The stronger ground of objection to them was their unreality. They had lost touch with life. They had made philosophy itself seem unreal. “They are not philosophers, but fiddlers,” said the sturdy old Stoic Musonius.[190] It is not necessary to suppose that they were all charlatans. There was then, as now, the irrepressible young man of good morals who wished to air his opinions. But the tendency to moralize had become divorced from practice. They preached, not because they were in grim earnest about the reformation of the world, but because preaching was a respectable profession, and the listening to sermons a fashionable diversion. “The mass of men,” says Plutarch,[191] “enjoy and admire a philosopher when he is discoursing about their neighbours; but if the philosopher, leaving their neighbours alone, speaks his mind about things that are of importance to the men themselves, they take offence and vote him a bore; for they think that they ought to listen to a philosopher in his lecture-room in the same bland way that they listen to tragedians in the theatre. This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them.”

Against this whole system of veneering rhetoric with philosophy, there was a strong reaction. Apart from the early Christian writers, with whom “sophist” is always a word of scorn, there were men, especially among the new school of Stoics, who were at open war with its unreality.[192] I will ask you to listen to the expostulation which the great moral reformer Epictetus addresses to a rhetorician who came to him:

“First of all, tell yourself what you want to be and then act accordingly. For this is what we see done in almost all other cases. Men who are practising for the games first of all decide what they mean to be, and then proceed to do the things that follow from their decision.... So then when you say, Come and listen to my lecture, first of all consider whether your action be not thrown away for want of an end, and then consider whether it be not a mistake, on account of your real end being a wrong one. Suppose I ask a man, ‘Do you wish to do good by your expounding, or to gain applause?’ Thereupon straightway you hear him saying, ‘What do I care for the applause of the multitude?’ And his sentiment is right: for in the same way, applause is nothing to the musician quâ musician, or to the geometrician quâ geometrician.

“You wish to do good, then,” I continue; “in what particular respect? tell me, that I too may hasten to your lecture-room. But can a man impart good to others without having previously received good himself?

“No: just as a man is of no use to us in the way of carpentering unless he is himself a carpenter.

“Would you like to know, then, whether you have received good yourself? Bring me your convictions, philosopher. (Let us take an example.) Did you not the other day praise so-and-so more than you really thought he deserved? Did you not flatter that senator’s son?—and yet you would not like your own sons to be like him, would you?

“God forbid!

“Then why did you flatter him and toady to him?

“He is a clever young fellow, and a good student.

“How do you know that?

“He admires my lectures.

“Yes; that is the real reason. But don’t you think that these very people despise you in their secret hearts? I mean that when a man who is conscious that he has neither done nor thought any single good thing, finds a philosopher who tells him that he is a man of great ability, sincerity, and genuineness, of course he says to himself, ‘This man wants to get something out of me!’ Or (if this is not the case with you), tell me what proof he has given of great ability. No doubt he has attended you for a considerable time: he has heard you discoursing and expounding: but has he become more modest in his estimate of himself—or is he still looking for some one to teach him?

“Yes, he is looking for some one to teach him.

“To teach him how to live? No, fool; not how to live, but how to talk: which also is the reason why he admires you....

“[The truth is, you like applause: you care more for that than for doing good, and so you invite people to come and hear you.]

“But does a philosopher invite people to come and hear him? Is it not that as the sun, or as food, is its own sufficient attraction, so the philosopher also is his own sufficient attraction to those who are to be benefited by him? Does a physician invite people to come and let him heal them?... (Imagine what a genuine philosopher’s invitation would be)—‘I invite you to come and be told that you are in a bad way—that you care for everything except what you should care for—that you do not know what things are good and what evil—and that you are unhappy and unfortunate.’ A nice invitation! and yet if that is not the result of what a philosopher says, he and his words alike are dead. (Musonius) Rufus used to say, ‘If you have leisure to praise me, my teaching has been in vain.’ Accordingly he used to talk in such a way that each individual one of us who sat there thought that some one had been telling Rufus about him: he so put his finger upon what we had done, he so set the individual faults of each one of us clearly before our eyes.

“The philosopher’s lecture-room, gentlemen, is a surgery: when you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain. For when you come in, something is wrong with you: one man has put his shoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache. Am I—the surgeon—then, to sit down and give you a string of fine sentences, that you may praise me—and then go away—the man with the dislocated arm, the man with the abscess, the man with the headache—just as you came? Is it for this that young men come away from home, and leave their parents and their kinsmen and their property, to say ‘Bravo!’ to you for your fine moral conclusions? Is this what Socrates did—or Zeno—or Cleanthes?

“Well, but is there no such class of speeches as exhortations?

“Who denies it? But in what do exhortations consist? In being able to show, whether to one man or to many men, the contradiction in which they are involved, and that their thoughts are given to anything but what they really mean. For they mean to give them to the things that really tend to happiness, but they look for those things elsewhere than where they really are. (That is the true aim of exhortation): but to show this, is it necessary to place a thousand chairs, and invite people to come and listen, and dress yourself up in a fine gown, and ascend the pulpit—and describe the death of Achilles? Cease, I implore you, from bringing dishonour, as far as you can, upon noble words and deeds. There can be no stronger exhortation to duty, I suppose, than for a speaker to make it clear to his audience that he wants to get something out of them! Tell me who, after hearing you lecture or discourse, became anxious about or reflected upon himself? or who, as he went out of the room, said, ‘The philosopher put his finger upon my faults: I must not behave in that way again’?

“You cannot: the utmost praise you get is when a man says to another, ‘That was a beautiful passage about Xerxes,’ and the other says, ‘No, I liked best that about the battle of Thermopylæ.’

“This is a philosopher’s sermon!”[193]

I have dwelt on this feature of the Greek life of the early Christian centuries, not with the view of giving a complete picture of it, which would be impossible within the compass of a lecture, but rather with the view of establishing a presumption, which you will find amply justified by further researches, that it was sufficient, not only in its quality and complexity, but also in its mass, to account for certain features of early Christianity.

In passing from Greek life to Christianity, I will ask you, in the first instance, to note the broad distinction which exists between what in the primitive churches was known as “prophesying,” and that which in subsequent times came to be known as “preaching.” I lay the more stress upon the distinction for the accidental reason that, in the first reaction against the idea that “prophecy” necessarily meant “prediction,” it was maintained—and with a certain reservation the contention was true—that a “prophet” meant a “preacher.” The reservation is, that the prophet was not merely a preacher but a spontaneous preacher. He preached because he could not help it, because there was a divine breath breathing within him which must needs find an utterance. It is in this sense that the prophets of the early churches were preachers. They were not church officers appointed to discharge certain functions. They were the possessors of a charisma, a divine gift which was not official but personal. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” They did not practise beforehand how or what they should say; for “the Holy Ghost taught them in that very hour what they should say.” Their language was often, from the point of view of the rhetorical schools, a barbarous patois. They were ignorant of the rules both of style and of dialectic. They paid no heed to refinements of expression. The greatest preacher of them all claimed to have come among his converts, in a city in which Rhetoric flourished, not with the persuasiveness of human logic, but with the demonstration which was afforded by spiritual power.

Of that “prophesying” of the primitive churches it is not certain that we possess any monument. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude are perhaps representatives of it among the canonical books of the New Testament. The work known as the Second Epistle of Clement is perhaps a representative of the form which it took in the middle of the second century; but though it is inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, it is rather more artistic in its form than a purely prophetic utterance is likely to have been.

In the course of the second century, this original spontaneity of utterance died almost entirely away. It may almost be said to have died a violent death. The dominant parties in the Church set their faces against it. The survivals of it in Asia Minor were formally condemned. The Montanists, as they were called, who tried to fan the lingering sparks of it into a flame, are ranked among heretics. And Tertullian is not even now admitted into the calendar of the Saints, because he believed the Montanists to be in the right.

It was inevitable that it should be so. The growth of a confederation of Christian communities necessitated the definition of a basis of confederation. Such a definition, and the further necessity of guarding it, were inconsistent with that free utterance of the Spirit which had existed before the confederation began. Prophesying died when the Catholic Church was formed.

In place of prophesying came preaching. And preaching is the result of the gradual combination of different elements. In the formation of a great institution it is inevitable that, as time goes on, different elements should tend to unite. To the original functions of a bishop, for example, were added by degrees the functions—which had originally been separate—of teacher.[194] In a similar way were fused together, on the one hand, teaching—that is, the tradition and exposition of the sacred books and of the received doctrine; and, on the other hand, exhortation—that is, the endeavour to raise men to a higher level of moral and spiritual life. Each of these was a function which, assuming a certain natural aptitude, could be learned by practice. Each of them was consequently a function which might be discharged by the permanent officers of the community, and discharged habitually at regular intervals without waiting for the fitful flashes of the prophetic fire. We consequently find that with the growth of organization there grew up also, not only a fusion of teaching and exhortation, but also the gradual restriction of the liberty of addressing the community to the official class.

It was this fusion of teaching and exhortation that constituted the essence of the homily: its form came from the sophists. For it was natural that when addresses, whether expository or hortatory, came to prevail in the Christian communities, they should be affected by the similar addresses which filled a large place in contemporary Greek life. It was not only natural but inevitable that when men who had been trained in rhetorical methods came to make such addresses, they should follow the methods to which they were accustomed. It is probable that Origen is not only the earliest example whose writings have come down to us, but also one of the earliest who took into the Christian communities these methods of the schools. He lectured, as the contemporary teachers seem to have lectured, every day: his subject-matter was the text of the Scriptures, as that of the rhetoricians and sophists by his side was Homer or Chrysippus: his addresses, like those of the best professors, were carefully prepared: he was sixty years of age, we are told, before he preached an extempore sermon.[195]

When the Christian communities emerge into the clearer light of the fourth century, the influence of the rhetorical schools upon them begins to be visible on a large scale and with permanent effects. The voice of the prophet had ceased, and the voice of the preacher had begun. The greatest Christian preachers of the fourth century had been trained to rhetorical methods, and had themselves taught rhetoric. Basil and Gregory Nazianzen studied at Athens under the famous professors Himerius and Prohæresius: Chrysostom studied under the still more famous Libanius, who on his death-bed said of him that he would have been his worthiest successor “if the Christians had not stolen him.”[196] The discourses came to be called by the same names as those of the Greek professors. They had originally been called homilies—a word which was unknown in this sense in pre-Christian times, and which denoted the familiar intercourse and direct personal addresses of common life. They came to be called by the technical terms of the schools—discourses, disputations, or speeches.[197] The distinction between the two kinds of terms is clearly shown by a later writer, who, speaking of a particular volume of Chrysostom’s addresses, says, “They are called ‘speeches’ (λόγοι), but they are more like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he again and again addresses his hearers as actually present before his eyes.”[198] The form of the discourses tended to be the same: if you examine side by side a discourse of Himerius or Themistius or Libanius, and one of Basil or Chrysostom or Ambrose, you will find a similar artificiality of structure, and a similar elaboration of phraseology. They were delivered under analogous circumstances. The preacher sat in his official chair: it was an exceptional thing for him to ascend the reader’s ambo, the modern “pulpit:”[199] the audience crowded in front of him, and frequently interrupted him with shouts of acclamation. The greater preachers tried to stem the tide of applause which surged round them: again and again Chrysostom begs his hearers to be silent: what he wants is, not their acclamations, but the fruits of his preaching in their lives.[200] There is one passage which not only illustrates this point, but also affords a singular analogy to the remonstrance of Epictetus which was quoted just now:

“There are many preachers who make long sermons: if they are well applauded, they are as glad as if they had obtained a kingdom: if they bring their sermon to an end in silence, their despondency is worse, I may almost say, than hell. It is this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears with their intonation and the structure of their phrases, just as if you were listening to singers and lute-players. And we preachers humour your fancies, instead of trying to crush them. We act like a father who gives a sick child a cake or an ice, or something else that is merely nice to eat—just because he asks for it; and takes no pains to give him what is good for him; and then when the doctors blame him says, ‘I could not bear to hear my child cry.’.... That is what we do when we elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and harmonies, to please and not to profit, to be admired and not to instruct, to delight and not to touch you, to go away with your applause in our ears, and not to better your conduct. Believe me, I am not speaking at random: when you applaud me as I speak, I feel at the moment as it is natural for a man to feel. I will make a clean breast of it. Why should I not? I am delighted and overjoyed. And then when I go home and reflect that the people who have been applauding me have received no benefit, and indeed that whatever benefit they might have had has been killed by the applause and praises, I am sore at heart, and I lament and fall to tears, and I feel as though I had spoken altogether in vain, and I say to myself, What is the good of all your labours, seeing that your hearers don’t want to reap any fruit out of all that you say? And I have often thought of laying down a rule absolutely prohibiting all applause, and urging you to listen in silence.”[201]

And there is a passage near the end of Gregory Nazianzen’s greatest sermon, in which the human nature of which Chrysostom speaks bursts forth with striking force: after the famous peroration in which after bidding farewell one by one to the church and congregation which he loved, to the several companies of his fellow-workers, and to the multitudes who had thronged to hear him preach, he turns to the court and his opponents the Arian courtiers—

“Farewell, princes and palaces, the royal court and household—whether ye be faithful to the king I know not, ye are nearly all of you unfaithful to God.” (There was evidently a burst of applause, and he interrupts his peroration with an impromptu address.) “Yes—clap your hands, shout aloud, exalt your orator to heaven: your malicious and chattering tongue has ceased: it will not cease for long: it will fight (though I am absent) with writing and ink: but just for the moment we are silent.” (Then the peroration is resumed.) “Farewell, O great and Christian city....”[202]

I will add only one more instance of the way in which the habits of the sophists flowed into the Christian churches. Christian preachers, like the sophists, were sometimes peripatetic; they went from place to place, delivering their orations and making money by delivering them. The historians Socrates and Sozomen[203] tell an instructive story of two Syrian bishops, Severianus of Gabala and Antiochus of Ptolemais (St. Jean d’Acre). They were both famous for their rhetoric, though Severianus could not quite get rid of his Syrian accent. Antiochus went to Constantinople, and stayed there a long time, preaching frequently in the churches, and making a good deal of money thereby. On his return to Syria, Severianus, hearing about the money, resolved to follow his example: he waited for some time, exercised his rhetoric, got together a large stock of sermons, and then went to Constantinople. He was kindly received by the bishop, and soon became both a great popular preacher and a favourite at court. The fate of many preachers and court favourites overtook him: he excited great jealousy, was accused of heresy and banished from the city; and only by the personal intercession of the Empress Eudoxia was he received back again into ecclesiastical favour.

Such are some of the indications of the influence of Greek Rhetoric upon the early churches. It created the Christian sermon. It added to the functions of church officers a function which is neither that of the exercise of discipline, nor of administration of the funds, nor of taking the lead in public worship, nor of the simple tradition of received truths, but that of either such an exegesis of the sacred books as the Sophists gave of Homer, or such elaborated discourses as they also gave upon the speculative and ethical aspects of religion. The result was more far-reaching than the creation of either an institution or a function. If you look more closely into history, you will find that Rhetoric killed Philosophy. Philosophy died, because for all but a small minority it ceased to be real. It passed from the sphere of thought and conduct to that of exposition and literature. Its preachers preached, not because they were bursting with truths which could not help finding expression, but because they were masters of fine phrases and lived in an age in which fine phrases had a value. It died, in short, because it had become sophistry. But sophistry is of no special age or country. It is indigenous to all soils upon which literature grows. No sooner is any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the style’s sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. It came into the educated world in the simple dress of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won that world by the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its brotherhood, by its divine message of consolation and of hope. Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who persuaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby to win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest at the price of reality. With that its progress stopped. There has been an element of sophistry in it ever since; and so far as in any age that element has been dominant, so far has the progress of Christianity been arrested. Its progress is arrested now, because many of its preachers live in an unreal world. The truths they set forth are truths of utterance rather than truths of their lives. But if Christianity is to be again the power that it was in its earliest ages, it must renounce its costly purchase. A class of rhetorical chemists would be thought of only to be ridiculed: a class of rhetorical religionists is only less anomalous because we are accustomed to it. The hope of Christianity is, that the class which was artificially created may ultimately disappear; and that the sophistical element in Christian preaching will melt, as a transient mist, before the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come, who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone by, will speak only “as the Spirit gives them utterance.”

Lecture V.
CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

The power of generalizing and of forming abstract ideas exists, or at least is exercised, in varying degrees among different races and at different times. The peculiar feature of the intellectual history of the Greeks is the rapidity with which the power was developed, and the strength of the grasp which it had upon them.

The elaboration of one class of such ideas, those of form and quantity, led to the formation of a group of sciences, the mathematical sciences, which hold a permanent place. The earliest and most typical of these sciences is geometry. In it, the attention is drawn away from all the other characteristics of material things, and fixed upon the single characteristic of their form. The forms are regarded in themselves. The process of abstraction or analysis reaches its limit in the point, and from that limit the mind, making a new departure, begins the process of construction or synthesis. Complex ideas are formed by the addition of one simple idea to another, and having been so formed can be precisely defined. Their constituent elements can be distinctly stated, and a clear boundary drawn round the whole. They can be so marked off from other ideas that the idea which one man has formed can be communicated to and represented in another man’s mind. The inferences which, assuming certain “axioms” to be true and certain “postulates” to be granted, are made by one man, are accepted by another man or at once disproved. There is no question of mere probability, nor any halting between two opinions. The inferences are not only true but certain.

The result is, that there are not two sciences of geometry, but one: all who study it are agreed as to both its definitions and its inferences.

The elaboration of another class of abstract ideas, those of quality, marched at first by a parallel road. To a limited extent such a parallel march is possible. The words which are used to express sensible qualities suggest the same ideas to different minds. They are applied by different minds to the same objects. But the limits of such an agreement are narrow. When we pass from the abstract ideas of qualities, or generalizations as to substances, which can be tested by the senses, to such ideas as those, for example, of courage or justice, law or duty, though the words suggest, on the whole, the same ideas to one man as to another, not all men would uniformly apply the same words to the same actions. The phenomena which suggest such ideas assume a different form and colour as they are regarded from different points of view. They enter into different combinations. They are not sharply marked out by lines which would be universally recognized. The attention of different men is arrested by different features. There is consequently no universally recognized definition of them. Nor is such a definition possible. The ideas themselves tend to shade off into their contraries. There is a fringe of haze round each of them. The result is that assertions about them vary. There is not one system of philosophy only; there are many.

Between these two classes of generalizations and abstractions, those of quantity and those of quality or substance, many Greek thinkers do not appear to have made any clear distinction. Ideas of each class were regarded as equally capable of being defined; the canons of inference which were applicable to the one were conceived to be equally applicable to the other: and the certainty of inference and exactness of demonstration which were possible in regard to the ideal forms of geometry, were supposed to be also possible in regard to the conceptions of metaphysics and ethics.[204]

The habit of making definitions, and of drawing deductions from them, was fostered by the habit of discussion. Discussion under the name of dialectic, which implies that it was but a regulated conversation, had a large place, not only in the rhetorical and philosophical schools, but also in ordinary Greek life. It was like a game of cards. The game, so to speak, was conducted under strict and recognized rules; but it could not proceed unless each card had a determined and admitted value. The definition of terms was its necessary preliminary; and dialectic helped to spread the habit of requiring definitions over a wider area and to give it a deeper root.

There was less divergence in the definitions themselves than there was in the propositions that were deduced from them. That is to say, there was a verbal agreement as to definitions which was not a real agreement of ideas: the same words were found on examination to cover different areas of thought. But whether the difference lay in the definitions themselves or in the deductions made from them, there was nothing to determine which of two contrary or contradictory propositions was true. There was no universally recognized standard of appeal, or criterion, as it was termed. Indeed, the question of the nature of the criterion was one of the chief questions at issue. Consequently, assertions about abstract ideas and wide generalizations could only be regarded as the affirmations of a personal conviction. The making of such an affirmation was expressed by the same phrase which was used for a resolution of the will—“It seems to me,” or “It seems (good) to me” (δοκεῖ μοι): the affirmation itself, by the corresponding substantive, dogma (δόγμα). But just as the resolutions of the will of a monarch were obeyed by his subjects, that is, were adopted as resolutions of the will of other persons, so the affirmations of a thinker might be assented to by those who listened to him, that is, might become affirmations of other persons. In the one case as in the other, the same word dogma was employed.[205] It thus came to express (1) a decree, (2) a doctrine. The latter use tended to predominate. The word came ordinarily to express an affirmation made by a philosopher which was accepted as true by those who, from the fact of so accepting it, became his followers and formed his school. The acquiescence of a large number of men in the same affirmation gave to such an affirmation a high degree of probability; but it did not cause it to lose its original character of a personal conviction, nor did it afford any guarantee that the coincidence of expression was also a coincidence of ideas either between the original thinker and his disciples, or between the disciples themselves.[206]

Within these limits of its original and proper use, and as expressing a fact of mind, the word has an indisputable value. But the fact of the personal character of a dogma soon became lost to sight. Two tendencies which grew with a parallel growth dominated the world in place of the recognition of it. It came to be assumed that certain convictions of certain philosophers were not simply true in relation to the philosophers themselves, and to the state of knowledge in their time, but had a universal validity: subjective and temporary convictions were thus elevated to the rank of objective and eternal truths. It came also to be assumed that the processes of reason so closely followed the order of nature, that a system of ideas constructed in strict accordance with the laws of reasoning corresponded exactly with the realities of things. The unity of such a system reflected, it was thought, the unity of the world of objective fact. It followed that the truth or untruth of a given proposition was thought to be determined by its logical consistency or inconsistency with the sum of previous inferences.

These tendencies were strongly accentuated by the decay of original thinking. Philosophy in later Greece was less thought than literature. It was the exegesis of received doctrines. Philosophers had become professors. The question of what was in itself true had become entangled with the question of what the Master had said. The moral duty of adherence to the traditions of a school was stronger than the moral duty of finding the truth at all hazards. The literary expression of a doctrine came to be more important than the doctrine itself. The differences of expression between one thinker and another were exaggerated. Words became fetishes. Outside the schools were those who were littérateurs rather than philosophers, and who fused different elements together into systems which had a greater unity of literary form than of logical coherence. But these very facts of the literary character of philosophy, and of the contradictions in the expositions of it, served to spread it over a wider area. They tended on the one hand to bring a literary acquaintance with philosophy into the sphere of general education, and on the other hand to produce a propaganda. Sect rivalled sect in trying to win scholars for its school. The result was that the ordinary life of later Greece was saturated with philosophical ideas, and that the discordant theories of rival schools were blended together in the average mind into a syncretistic dogmatism.

Against this whole group of tendencies there was more than one reaction. The tendency to dogmatize was met by the tendency to doubt; and the tendency to doubt flowed in many streams, which can with difficulty be traced in minute detail, but whose general course is sufficiently described for the ordinary student in the Academics of Cicero. In the second and third centuries of our era there had come to be three main groups of schools. “Some men,” writes Sextus Empiricus,[207] “say that they have found the truth; some say that it is impossible for truth to be apprehended; some still search for it. The first class consists of those who are specially designated Dogmatics, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and some others: the second class consists of the followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, and other Academics: the third class consists of the Sceptics.” They may be distinguished as the philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy of research.[208] But the first of these was in an overwhelming majority. The Dogmatics, especially in the form either of pure Stoicism or of Stoicism largely infused with Platonism, were in possession of the field of educated thought. It is a convincing proof of the completeness with which that thought was saturated with their methods and their fundamental conceptions, that those methods and conceptions are found even among the philosophers of research who claimed to have wholly disentangled themselves from them.[209]

The philosophy of assertion, the philosophy of denial, and the philosophy of research, were all alike outside the earliest forms of Christianity. In those forms the moral and spiritual elements were not only supreme but exclusive. They reflected the philosophy, not of Greece, but of Palestine. That philosophy was almost entirely ethical. It dealt with the problems, not of being in the abstract, but of human life. It was stated for the most part in short antithetical sentences, with a symbol or parable to enforce them. It was a philosophy of proverbs. It had no eye for the minute anatomy of thought. It had no system, for the sense of system was not yet awakened. It had no taste for verbal distinctions. It was content with the symmetry of balanced sentences, without attempting to construct a perfect whole. It reflected as in a mirror, and not unconsciously, the difficulties, the contradictions, the unsolved enigmas of the world of fact.

When this Palestinian philosophy became more self-conscious than it had been, it remained still within its own sphere, the enigmas of the moral world were still its subject-matter, and it became in the Fathers of the Talmud on the one hand fatalism, and on the other casuistry.

The earliest forms of Christianity were not only outside the sphere of Greek philosophy, but they also appealed, on the one hand, mainly to the classes which philosophy did not reach, and, on the other hand, to a standard which philosophy did not recognize. “Not many wise men after the flesh” were called in St. Paul’s time: and more than a century afterwards, Celsus sarcastically declared the law of admission to the Christian communities to be—“Let no educated man enter, no wise man, no prudent man, for such things we deem evil; but whoever is ignorant, whoever is unintelligent, whoever is uneducated, whoever is simple, let him come and be welcome.”[210] It proclaimed, moreover, that “the philosophy of the world was foolishness with God.” It appealed to prophecy and to testimony. “Instead of logical demonstration, it produced living witnesses of the words and wonderful doings of Jesus Christ.” The philosophers from the point of view of “worldly education” made sport of it: Celsus[211] declared that the Christian teachers were no better than the priests of Mithra or of Hekaté, leading men wherever they willed with the maxims of a blind belief.

It is therefore the more remarkable that within a century and a half after Christianity and philosophy first came into close contact, the ideas and methods of philosophy had flowed in such mass into Christianity, and filled so large a place in it, as to have made it no less a philosophy than a religion.

The question which arises, and which should properly be discussed before the influences of particular ideas are traced in particular doctrines, is, how this result is to be accounted for as a whole. The answer must explain both how Christianity and philosophy came into contact, and how when in contact the one exercised upon the other the influence of a moulding force.

The explanation is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the apparent and superficial antagonism, between certain leading ideas of current philosophy and the leading ideas of Christianity there was a special and real kinship. Christianity gave to the problems of philosophy a new solution which was cognate to the old, and to its doubts the certainty of a revelation. The kinship of ideas is admitted, and explanations of it are offered by both Christian writers and their opponents. “We teach the same as the Greeks,” says Justin Martyr,[212] “though we alone are hated for what we teach.” “Some of our number,” says Tertullian,[213] “who are versed in ancient literature, have composed books by means of which it may be clearly seen that we have embraced nothing new or monstrous, nothing in which we have not the support of common and public literature.” Elsewhere[214] the same writer founds an argument for the toleration of Christianity on the fact that its opponents maintained it to be but a kind of philosophy, teaching the very same doctrines as the philosophers—innocence, justice, endurance, soberness, and chastity: he claims on that ground the same liberty for Christians which was enjoyed by philosophers.

The general recognition of this kinship of ideas is even more conclusively shown by the fact that explanations of it were offered on both the one side and the other.

(a) It was argued by some Christian apologists that the best doctrines of philosophy were due to the inworking in the world of the same Divine Word who had become incarnate in Jesus Christ. “The teachings of Plato,” says Justin Martyr,[215] “are not alien to those of Christ, though not in all respects similar.... For all the writers (of antiquity) were able to have a dim vision of realities by means of the indwelling seed of the implanted Word.” It was argued by others that philosophers had borrowed or “stolen” their doctrines from the Scriptures. “From the divine preachings of the prophets,” says Minucius Felix,[216] “they imitated the shadow of half-truths.” “What poet or sophist,” says Tertullian,[217] “has not drunk at the fountain of the prophets? From thence it is, therefore, that philosophers have quenched the thirst of their minds, so that it is the very things which they have of ours which bring us into comparison with them.” “They have borrowed from our books,” says Clement of Alexandria,[218] “the chief doctrines they hold, both on faith and knowledge and science, on hope and love, on repentance and temperance and the fear of God:” and he goes in detail through many doctrines, speculative as well as ethical, either to show that they were borrowed from revelation, or to uphold the truer thesis that philosophy was no less the schoolmaster of the Greeks than the Law was of the Jews to bring them to Christ.

(b) It was argued, on the other hand, by the opponents of Christianity that it was a mere mimicry of philosophy or a blurred copy of it. “They weave a web of misunderstandings of the old doctrine,” says Celsus,[219] “and sound them forth with a loud trumpet before men, like hierophants booming round those who are being initiated in mysteries.” Christianity was but a misunderstood Platonism. Whatever in it was true had been better expressed before.[220] Even the striking and distinctive saying of the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” was but a coarser and more homely way of saying what had been extremely well said by Plato’s Socrates.[221]

It was through this kinship of ideas that Christianity was readily absorbed by some of the higher natures in the Greek world. The two classes of ideas probably came into contact in philosophical Judaism. For it is clear on the one hand that the Jews of the dispersion had a literature, and on the other hand that that literature was clothing itself in Greek forms and attracting the attention of the Greek world. Some of that literature was philosophical. In the Sibylline verses, the poem of Phocylides, and the letters of Heraclitus, there is a blending of theology and ethics: in some of the writings which are ascribed to Philo, but which in reality bridge the interval between Philo and the Christian Fathers, there is a blending of theology and metaphysics. None of them are “very far from the kingdom of God.” The hypothesis that they paved the way for Christian philosophy is confirmed by the fact that in the first articulate expressions of that philosophy precisely those elements are dominant which were dominant in Jewish philosophy. Two such elements may specially be mentioned: (1) the allegorical method of interpretation which was common to both Jews and Greeks, and by means of which both the Gnostics who were without, and the Alexandrians who were within, the pale of the associated communities, were able to find their philosophy in the Old Testament as well as in the New; (2) the cosmological speculations, which occupied only a small space in the thoughts of earlier Greek thinkers, but which were already widening to a larger circle on the surface of Greek philosophy, and which became so prominent in the first Christian philosophies as to have thrust aside almost all other elements in the current representations of them.

The Christian philosophy which thus rose out of philosophical Judaism was partly apologetic and partly speculative. The apologetic part of it arose from the necessity of defence. The educated world tended to scout Christianity when it was first presented to them, as an immoral and barbarous atheism. It was necessary to show that it was neither the one nor the other. The defence naturally fell into the hands of those Christians who were versed in Greek methods; and they not less naturally sought for points of agreement rather than of difference, and presented Christian truths in a Greek form. The speculative part of it arose from some of its elements having found an especial affinity with some of the new developments of Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Inside the original communities were men who began to build great edifices of speculation upon the narrow basis of one or other of the pinnacles of the Christian temple; and outside those communities were men who began to coalesce into communities which had the same moral aims as the original communities, and which appealed in the main to the same authorities, but in which the simpler forms of worship were elaborated into a thaumaturgic ritual, and the solid facts of Scripture history evaporated into mist. They were linked on the one hand with the cults of the Greek mysteries, and on the other with philosophical idealism. The tendency to conceive of abstract ideas as substances, with form and real existence, received in them its extreme development. Wisdom and vice, silence and desire, were real beings: they were not, as they had been to earlier thinkers, mere thin vapours which had floated upwards from the world of sensible existences, and hung like clouds in an uncertain twilight. The real world was indeed not the world of sensible existences, of thoughts and utterances about sensible things, but a world in which sensible existences were the shadows and not the substance, the waves and not the sea.[222]

It was natural that those who held to the earlier forms of Christianity should take alarm. “I am not unaware,” says Clement of Alexandria, in setting forth the design of his Stromateis,[223] “of what is dinned in our ears by the ignorant timidity of those who tell us that we ought to occupy ourselves with the most necessary matters, those in which the Faith consists: and that we should pass by the superfluous matters that lie outside them, which vex and detain us in vain over points that contribute nothing to the end in view. There are others who think that philosophy will prove to have been introduced into life from an evil source, at the hands of a mischievous inventor, for the ruin of men.” “The simpler-minded,” says Tertullian,[224] “not to say ignorant and unlearned men, who always form the majority of believers, are frightened at the Economy” [the philosophical explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity]. “These men,” says a contemporary writer,[225] of some of the early philosophical schools at Rome, “have fearlessly perverted the divine Scriptures, and set aside the rule of the ancient faith, and have not known Christ, seeking as they do, not what the divine Scriptures say, but what form of syllogism may be found to support their godlessness; and if one advances any express statement of the divine Scripture, they try to find out whether it can form a conjunctive or a disjunctive hypothetical. And having deserted the holy Scriptures of God, they study geometry, being of the earth and speaking of the earth, and ignoring Him who comes from above. Some of them, at any rate, give their minds to Euclid: some of them are admiring disciples of Aristotle and Theophrastus: as for Galen, some of them go so far as actually to worship him.”

The history of the second century is the history of the clash and conflict between these new mystical and philosophical elements of Christianity and its earlier forms. On the one hand were the majority of the original communities, holding in the main the conception of Christianity which probably finds its best contemporary exposition in the first two books of the Apostolical Constitutions, a religion of stern moral practice and of strict moral discipline, of the simple love of God and the unelaborated faith in Jesus Christ. On the other hand were the new communities, and the new members of the older communities, with their conception of knowledge side by side with faith, and with their tendency to speculate side by side with their acceptance of tradition. The conflict was inevitable. In the current state of educated opinion it would have been as impossible for the original communities to ignore the existence of philosophical elements either in their own body, or in the new communities which were growing up around them, as it would be for the Christian churches of our own day to ignore physical science. The result of the conflict was, that the extreme wing of each of the contending parties dropped off from the main body. The old-fashioned Christians, who would admit of no compromise, and maintained the old usages unchanged, were gradually detached as Ebionites, or Nazaræans. The old orthodoxy became a new heresy. In the lists of the early hand-books they are ranked as the first heretics. The more philosophical Gnostics also passed one by one outside the Christian lines. Their ideas gradually lost their Christian colour. They lived in another, but non-Christian, form. The true Gnostic, though he repudiates the name, is Plotinus. The logical development of the thoughts of Basilides and Justin, of Valentinus and the Naassenes, is to be found in Neo-Platonism—that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set.

The struggle really ended, as almost all great conflicts end, in a compromise. There was apparently so complete a victory of the original communities and of the principles which they embodied, that their opponents seem to vanish from Christian literature and Christian history. It was in reality a victory in which the victors were the vanquished. There was so large an absorption by the original communities of the principles of their opponents as to destroy the main reason for a separate existence. The absorption was less of speculations than of the tendency to speculate. The residuum of permanent effect was mainly a certain habit of mind. This is at once a consequence and a proof of the general argument which has been advanced above, that certain elements of education in philosophy had been so widely diffused, and in the course of centuries had become so strongly rooted, as to have caused an instinctive tendency to throw ideas into a philosophical form, and to test assertions by philosophical canons. The existence of such a tendency is shown in the first instance by the mode in which the earliest “defenders of the faith” met their opponents; and the supposition that it was instinctive is a legitimate inference from the fact that it was unconscious. For Tatian,[226] though he ridicules Greek philosophy and professes to have abandoned it, yet builds up theories of the Logos, of free-will, and of the nature of spirit, out of the elements of current philosophical conceptions. Tertullian, though he asks,[227] “What resemblance is there between a philosopher and a Christian, between a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven?” expresses Christian truths in philosophical terms, and argues against his opponents—for example, against Marcion—by methods which might serve as typical examples of the current methods of controversy between philosophical schools. And Hippolytus,[228] though he reproves another Christian writer for listening to Gentile teaching, and so disobeying the injunction, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles,” is himself saturated with philosophical conceptions and philosophical literature.

The answer, in short, to the main question which has been before us is that Christianity came into a ground which was already prepared for it. Education was widely diffused over the Greek world, and among all classes of the community. It had not merely aroused the habit of inquiry which is the foundation of philosophy, but had also taught certain philosophical methods. Certain elements of the philosophical temper had come into existence on a large scale, penetrating all classes of society and inwrought into the general intellectual fibre of the time. They had produced a certain habit of mind. When, through the kinship of ideas, Christianity had been absorbed by the educated classes, the habit of mind which had preceded it remained and dominated. It showed itself mainly in three ways:

1. The first of these was the tendency to define. The earliest Christians had been content to believe in God and to worship Him, without endeavouring to define precisely the conception of Him which lay beneath their faith and their worship. They looked up to Him as their Father in heaven. They thought of Him as one, as beneficent, and as supreme. But they drew no fence of words round their idea of Him, and still less did they attempt to demonstrate by processes of reason that their idea of Him was true. But there is an anecdote quoted with approval by Eusebius[229] from Rhodon, a controversialist of the latter part of the second century, which furnishes a striking proof of the growing strength at that time of the philosophical temper. It relates the main points of a short controversy between Rhodon and Apelles. Apelles was in some respects in sympathy with Marcion, and in some respects followed the older Christian tradition. He refused to be drawn into the new philosophizing current; and Rhodon attacked him for his conservatism. “He was often refuted for his errors, which indeed made him say that we ought not to inquire too closely into doctrine; but that as every one had believed, so he should remain. For he declared that those who set their hopes on the Crucified One would be saved, if only they were found in good works. But the most uncertain thing of all that he said was what he said about God. He held no doubt that there is One Principle, just as we hold too: but when I said to him, ‘Tell us how you demonstrate that, or on what grounds you are able to assert that there is One Principle,’ ... he said that he did not know, but that that was his conviction. When I thereupon adjured him to tell the truth, he swore that he was telling the truth, that he did not know how there is one unbegotten God, but that nevertheless so he believed. Then I laughed at him and denounced him, for that, giving himself out to be a teacher, he did not know how to prove what he taught.”

2. The second manifestation of the philosophical habit of mind was the tendency to speculate, that is, to draw inferences from definitions, to weave the inferences into systems, and to test assertions by their logical consistency or inconsistency with those systems. The earliest Christians had but little conception of a system. The inconsistency of one apparently true statement with another did not vex their souls. Their beliefs reflected the variety of the world and of men’s thoughts about the world. It was one of the secrets of the first great successes of Christianity. There were different and apparently irreconcilable elements in it. It appealed to men of various mould. It furnished a basis for the construction of strangely diverse edifices. But the result of the ascendency of philosophy was, that in the fourth and fifth centuries the majority of churches insisted not only upon a unity of belief in the fundamental facts of Christianity, but also upon a uniformity of speculations in regard to those facts. The premises of those speculations were assumed; the conclusions logically followed: the propositions which were contrary or contradictory to them were measured, not by the greater or less probability of the premises, but by the logical certainty of the conclusions; and symmetry became a test of truth.

3. The new habit of mind manifested itself not less in the importance which came to be attached to it. The holding of approved opinions was elevated to a position at first co-ordinate with, and at last superior to, trust in God and the effort to live a holy life. There had been indeed from the first an element of knowledge in the conception of the means of salvation. The knowledge of the facts of the life of Jesus Christ necessarily precedes faith in him. But under the touch of Greek philosophy, knowledge had become speculation: whatever obligation attached to faith in its original sense was conceived to attach to it in its new sense: the new form of knowledge was held to be not less necessary than the old.

The Western communities not only took over the greater part of the inheritance, but also proceeded to assume in a still greater degree the correspondence of ideas with realities, and of inferences about ideas with truths about realities. It added such large groups to the sum of them, that in the dogmatic theology of Latin and Teutonic Christendom the content is more Western than Eastern. But the conception of such a theology and its underlying assumptions are Greek. They come from the Greek tendency to attach the same certainty to metaphysical as to physical ideas. They are in reality built upon a quicksand. There is no more reason to suppose that God has revealed metaphysics than that He has revealed chemistry. The Christian revelation is, at least primarily, a setting forth of certain facts. It does not in itself afford a guarantee of the certainty of the speculations which are built upon those facts. All such speculations are dogmas in the original sense of the word. They are simply personal convictions. To the statement of one man’s convictions other men may assent: but they can never be quite sure that they understand its terms in the precise sense in which the original framer of the statement understood them.

The belief that metaphysical theology is more than this, is the chief bequest of Greece to religious thought, and it has been a damnosa hereditas. It has given to later Christianity that part of it which is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many souls.

Lecture VI.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

It has been common to construct pictures of the state of morals in the first centuries of the Christian era from the statements of satirists who, like all satirists, had a large element of caricature, and from the denunciations of the Christian apologists, which, like all denunciations, have a large element of exaggeration. The pictures so constructed are mosaics of singular vices, and they have led to the not unnatural impression that those centuries constituted an era of exceptional wickedness. It is no doubt difficult to gauge the average morality of any age. It is questionable whether the average morality of civilized ages has largely varied: it is possible that if the satirists of our own time were equally outspoken, the vices of ancient Rome might be found to have a parallel in modern London; and it is probable, not on merely à priori grounds, but from the nature of the evidence which remains, that there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were good neighbours and faithful friends, who conscientiously discharged their civil duties, and were in all the current senses of the word “moral” men.[230]

It has also been common to frame statements of the moral philosophy which dominated in those centuries, entirely from the data afforded by earlier writers, and to account for the existence of nobler elements in contemporary writers by the hypothesis that Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, had come into contact with Christian teachers. In the case of Seneca, the belief in such contact went so far as to induce a writer in an imitative age to produce a series of letters which are still commonly printed at the end of his works, and which purport to be a correspondence between him and St. Paul. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove the negative proposition that such writers did not come into contact with Christianity; but a strong presumption against the idea that such contact, if it existed, influenced to any considerable extent their ethical principles, is established by the demonstrable fact that those principles form an integral part of their whole philosophical system, and that their system is in close logical and historical connection with that of their philosophical predecessors.[231]

It will be found on a closer examination that the age in which Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral reformation. There was the growth of a higher religious morality, which believed that God was pleased by moral action rather than by sacrifice.[232] There was the growth of a belief that life requires amendment.[233] There was a reaction in the popular mind against the vices of the great centres of population. This is especially seen in the large multiplication of religious guilds, in which purity of life was a condition of membership: it prepared the minds of men to receive Christian teaching, and forms not the least important among the causes which led to the rapid dissemination of that teaching: it affected the development of Christianity in that the members of the religious guilds who did so accept Christian teaching, brought over with them into the Christian communities many of the practices of their guilds and of the conceptions which lay beneath them. The philosophical phase of the reformation began on the confines of Stoicism and Cynicism. For Cynicism had revived. It had almost faded into insignificance after Zeno and Chrysippus had formed its nobler elements into a new system, and left only its “dog-bark”[234] and its squalor. But when the philosophical descendants of Zeno and Chrysippus had become fashionable littérateurs, and had sunk independence of thought and practice in a respectability and “worldly conformity” which the more earnest men felt to be intolerable, Cynicism revived, or rather the earlier and better Stoicism revived, to re-assert the paramount importance of moral conduct, and to protest against the unnatural alliance between philosophy and the fashionable world.

It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.[235] In him, whether he be called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once their loftiest expression and their most complete realization: and it will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his sermons speak for themselves.

The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching.

1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic, which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant, was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but they were ceasing to regard the actual “living according to nature” as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over literary knowledge. It was at first crude and repulsive. If the Stoics were “the preachers of the salon,” the Cynics were “the preachers of the street.”[236] They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence, the squalor was accidental. The former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave it a new impulse: the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they said.[237] Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic philosophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual conditions of the world as it is. The state of human nature is such, that to linger upon the threshold of philosophy is to induce a moral torpor. The student who aims at shaping his reason into harmony with nature has to begin, not with unformed and plastic material, which he can fashion to his will by systematic rules of art, but with his nature as it is shaped already, almost beyond possibility of unshaping, by pernicious habits, and beguiling associations of ideas, and false opinions about good and evil. While you are teaching him logic and physics, the very evils which it is his object to remedy will be gathering fresh strength. The old familiar names of “good” and “evil,” with all the false ideas which they suggest, will be giving birth at every moment to mistaken judgments and wrong actions, to all the false pleasures and false pains which it is the very purpose of philosophy to destroy. He must begin, as he must end, with practice. He must accept precepts and act upon them before he learns the theory of them. His progress in philosophy must be measured by his progress, not in knowledge, but in moral conduct.

This view, which Epictetus preaches again and again with passionate fervour, will be best stated in his own words:[238]

“A man who is making progress, having learnt from the philosophers that desire has good things for its object and undesire evil things,—having learnt moreover that in no other way can contentment and dispassionateness come to a man than by his never failing of the object of his desire and never encountering the object of undesire,—banishes the one altogether, or at least postpones it, while he allows the other to act only in regard to those things which are within the province of the will. For he knows that if he strives not to have things that are without the province of the will, he will some time or other encounter some such things and so be unhappy. But if what moral perfection professes is to cause happiness and dispassionateness and peace of mind, then of course progress towards moral perfection is progress towards each one of the things which moral perfection professes to secure. For in all cases progress is the approaching to that to which perfection finally brings us.

“How is it, then, that while we admit this to be the definition of moral perfection, we seek and show off progress in other things? What is the effect of moral perfection?

“‘Peace of mind?’

“Who then is making progress towards it? He who has read many treatises of Chrysippus? Surely moral perfection does not consist in this—in understanding Chrysippus: if it does, then confessedly progress towards moral perfection is nothing else than understanding a good deal of Chrysippus. But as it is, while we admit that moral perfection effects one thing, we make progress—the approximation to perfection—effect another.

“‘This man,’ some one tells us, ‘can now read Chrysippus even by himself.’

“‘You are most assuredly making splendid progress, my friend,’ he tells him.

“Progress indeed! why do you make game of him? Why do you lead him astray from the consciousness of his misfortunes? Will you not show him what the effect of moral perfection is, that he may learn where to look for progress towards it?

“Look for progress, my poor friend, in the direction of the effect which you have to produce. And what is the effect which you have to produce? Never to be disappointed of the object of your desire, and never to encounter the object of your undesire: never to miss the mark in your endeavours to do and not to do: never to be deceived in your assent and suspension of assent. The first of these is the primary and most necessary point: for if it is with trembling and reluctance that you seek to avoid falling into evil, how can you be said to be making progress?

“It is in these respects, then, that I ask you to show me your progress. If I were to say to an athlete, ‘Show me your muscles,’ and he were to say, ‘See here are my dumb-bells,’ I should reply, ‘Begone with your dumb-bells! What I want to see is, not them, but their effect.’ (And yet that is just what you do:) ‘Take the treatise On Effort’ (you say), ‘and examine me in it.’ Slave! that is not what I want to know; but rather how you endeavour to do or not to do—how you desire to have and not to have—how you form your plans and purposes and preparations for action—whether you do all this in harmony with nature or not. If you do so in accordance with nature, show me that you do so, and I will say that you are making progress; but if not, begone, and do not merely interpret books, but write similar ones yourself besides. And what will you gain by it? Don’t you know that the whole book costs five shillings, and do you think the man who interprets the book is worth more than the book itself costs?

“Never, then, look for the effect (of philosophy) in one place, and progress towards that effect in another.

“Where, then, is progress to be looked for? If any one of you, giving up his allegiance to things outside him, has devoted himself entirely to his will—to cultivating and elaborating it so as to make it at last in harmony with nature, lofty, free, unthwarted, unhindered, conscientious, self-respectful: if he has learned that one who longs for or shuns what is not in his power can neither be conscientious nor free, but must be carried along with the changes and gusts of things—must be at the mercy of those who can produce or prevent them: if, moreover, from the moment when he rises in the morning he keeps watch and guard over these qualities of his soul—bathes like a man of honour, eats like a man who respects himself—through all the varying incidents of each successive hour working out his one great purpose, as a runner makes all things help his running, and a singing-master his teaching:—this man is making progress in very truth—this man is one who has not left home in vain.

“But if, on the other hand, he is wholly bent upon and labours at what is found in books, and has left home with a view to acquiring that, I tell him to go home again at once, and not neglect whatever business he may have there: for the object which has brought him away from home is a worthless one. This only (is worth anything), to study to banish from one’s life sorrows and lamentations and ‘Alas!’ and ‘Wretched me!’ and misfortune and failure—and to learn what death really is, and exile and imprisonment and the hemlock-draught, so as to be able to say in the prison, ‘My dear Crito, if so it please the gods, so let it be.’”

This new or revived conception of philosophy as the science of human conduct, as having for its purpose the actual reformation of mankind, had already led to the view that in the present state of human nature the study and practice of it required special kinds of effort. It was not only the science but also the art of life.[239] It formed, as such, no exception to the rule that all arts require systematic and habitual training. Just as the training of the muscles which is necessary to perfect bodily development is effected by giving them one by one an artificial and for the time an exaggerated exercise, so the training of the moral powers was effected, not by reading the rules and committing them to memory, but by giving them a similarly artificial and exaggerated exercise. A kind of moral gymnastic was necessary. The aim of it was to bring the passions under the control of reason, and to bring the will into harmony with the will of God.

(1) This special discipline of life was designated by the term which was in use for bodily training, askesis (ἄσκησις).[240] It is frequently used in this relation in Philo. He distinguishes three elements in the process of attaining goodness—nature, learning, discipline.[241] He distinguishes those who discipline themselves in wisdom by means of actual works, from those who have only a literary and intellectual knowledge of it.[242] He holds that the greatest and most numerous blessings that a man can have come from the gymnastic of moral efforts.[243] Its elements are “reading, meditation, reformation, the memory of noble ideals, self-restraint, the active practice of duties:”[244] in another passage he adds to these prayer, and the recognition of the indifference of things that are indifferent.[245] In the second century, when the idea of moral reformation had taken a stronger hold, this moral discipline was evidently carried out under systematic rules. It was not left to a student’s option. He must undergo hardships, drinking water rather than wine, sleeping on the ground rather than on a bed; and sometimes even subjecting himself to austerities, being scourged and bound with chains. There was sometimes no ostentation of endurance. Marcus Aurelius says that he owed it to Rusticus that he did not show off with a striking display either his acts of benevolence or his moral exercises.[246] “If you drink water,” says Epictetus in his Student’s Manual,[247] “don’t take every opportunity of saying, I drink water.... And if you resolve to exercise yourself in toil and hardship, do it for yourself alone, and not for the world outside. Don’t embrace statues (in public, to cool yourself); but if ever your thirst become extreme, fill your mouth with cold water and put it out again—and tell no one.” Epictetus himself preferred that men should be disciplined, not by bodily hardships, but by the voluntary repression of desire. The true “ascetic” is he who disciplines himself against all the suggestions of evil desire:[248] “an object of desire comes into sight: wait, poor soul; do not straightway be carried off your feet by it: consider, the contest is great, the task is divine; it is for kingship, for freedom, for calm, for undisturbedness. Think of God: call Him to be your helper and to stand by your side, as sailors call upon Castor and Pollux in a storm: for yours is a storm, the greatest of all storms, the storm of strong suggestions that sweep reason away.” In a similar way Lucian’s friend Nigrinus condemns those who endeavour to fashion young men to virtue by great bodily hardships rather than by a mingled discipline of body and mind: and Lucian himself says that he knew of some who had died under the excessive strain.[249]

This moral gymnastic, it was thought, was often best practised away from a man’s old associations. Consequently some philosophers advised their students to leave home and study elsewhere. They went into “retreat,” either in another city or in solitude. Against this also there was a reaction. In a forcible oration on the subject, Dio Chrysostom argues, as a modern Protestant might argue, against the monastic system.[250] “Cœlum non animum mutant,” he says, in effect, when they go from city to city. Everywhere a man will find the same hindrances both within and without: he will be only like a sick man changing from one bed to another. The true discipline is to live in a crowd and not heed its noise, to train the soul to follow reason without swerving, and not to “retreat” from that which seems to be the immediate duty before us.

The extent to which moral discipline and the system of “retreats” went on is uncertain, because they soon blended, as we shall see, with Christianity, and flowed with it in a single stream.

(2) But out of the ideas which they expressed, and the ideals which they held forth, there grew up a class of men which has never since died out, who devoted themselves “both by their preaching and living” to the moral reformation of mankind. Individual philosophers had had imitators, and Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school, but neither the one nor the other had filled a large place in contemporary society. With the revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,” says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings.”[251]

The distinction was marked in two chief ways:

(1) A philosopher let his beard grow, like the old Spartans. It was a protest against the elaborate attention to the person which marked the fashionable society of the time.

(2) A philosopher wore a coarse blanket, usually as his only dress. It was at once a protest against the prevalent luxury in dress and the badge of his profession. “Whenever,” says Dio Chrysostom, “people see one in a philosopher’s dress, they consider that he is thus equipped not as a sailor or a shepherd, but with a view to men, to warn them and rebuke them, and to give not one of them any whit of flattery nor to spare any one of them, but, on the contrary, to reform them as far as he possibly can by talking to them and to show them who they are.”[252]

The frequency with which this new class of moral reformers is mentioned in the literature of the time shows the large place which it filled.

2. The moral reformation affected the contents of ethical teaching chiefly by raising them from the sphere of moral philosophy to that of religion. In Epictetus there are two planes of ethical teaching. The one is that of orthodox and traditional Stoicism: in the other, Stoicism is transformed by the help of religious conceptions, and the forces which led to the practice of it receive the enormous impulse which comes from the religious emotions. The one is summed up in the maxim, Follow Nature; the other in the maxim, Follow God.

On the lower plane the purpose of philosophy is stated in various ways, each of which expresses the same fact. It is the bringing of the will into harmony with nature. It consists in making the “dealing with ideas” what it should be, that is, in dealing with them according to nature.[253] It is the thorough study of the conceptions of good and evil, and the right application of them to particular objects.[254] It is the endeavour to make the will unthwarted in its action,[255] to take sorrow and disappointment out of a man’s life,[256] and to change its disturbed torrent into a calm and steady stream. The result of the practice of philosophy is happiness.[257] The means of attaining that result are marked out by the constitution of human nature itself and the circumstances which surround it. That nature manifests itself in two forms, desires to have or not to have, efforts to do or not to do.[258] The one is stimulated by the presentation to the mind of an object which is judged to be “good,” the other by that of one which is judged to be “fitting.” The one mainly concerns the individual man in himself, the other concerns him in his relations with other men. The “state according to nature” of desire is that in which it never fails of gratification, the corresponding state of effort is that in which it never fails of its mark. Both the one and the other are determined by landmarks which nature itself has set in the circumstances that surround us. The natural limits of desire are those things that are in our power: the direction of effort is determined by our natural relations.

For example:[259]