Caesar and Christ

II. THE GROWTH OF JESUS

Both Matthew and Luke assign Jesus’ birth to “the days when Herod was king of Judea”²⁷—consequently before 3 B.C.. Luke, however, describes Jesus as “about thirty years old” when John baptized him “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius”^27a—i.e., A.D. 28-29; this would place Christ’s birth in the year 2-1 B.C. Luke adds that “in those days there went out a decree of Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed . . . when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Quirinius is known to have been legate in Syria between A.D. 6 and 12; Josephus notes a census by him in Judea, but ascribes it to A.D. 6-7;²⁸ we have no further mention of this census. Tertullian²⁹ records a census of Judea by Saturninus, governor of Syria 8-7 B.C.; if this is the census that Luke had in mind, the birth of Christ would have to be placed before 6 B.C.. We have no knowledge of the specific day of his birth. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200) reports diverse opinions on the subject in his day, some chronologists dating the birth April 19, some May 20; he himself assigned it to November 17, 3 B.C. As far back as the second century the Eastern Christians celebrated the Nativity on January 6. In 354 some Western churches, including those of Rome, commemorated the birth of Christ on December 25; this was then erroneously calculated as the winter solstice, on which the days begin to lengthen; it was already the central festival of Mithraism, the natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered sun. The Eastern churches clung for a time to January 6, and charged their Western brethren with sun worship and idolatry, but by the end of the fourth century December 25 had been adopted also in the East.³⁰

Matthew and Luke place the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, five miles south of Jerusalem; thence, they tell us, the family moved to Nazareth in Galilee. Mark makes no mention of Bethlehem, but merely names Christ “Jesus of Nazareth.”^* His parents gave him the quite common name Yeshu’a (our Joshua), meaning “the help of Yahveh”; the Greeks made this into lesous, the Romans into lesus.

He was apparently one of a large family, for his neighbors, marveling at his authoritative teaching, asked, “Where did he get this wisdom, and the power to do these wonders? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary, and are not his brothers named James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And do not his sisters live here among us?”³¹ Luke tells the story of the Annunciation with some literary art, and puts into the mouth of Miriam—Mary—that Magnificat which is one of the great poems embedded in the New Testament.

Next to her son, Mary is the most touching figure in the narrative: rearing him through all the painful joys of motherhood, proud of his youthful learning, wondering later at his doctrine and his claims, wishing to withdraw him from the exciting throng of his followers and bring him back to the healing quiet of his home (“thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing”), helplessly witnessing his crucifixion, and receiving his body into her arms; if this is not history it is supreme literature, for the relations of parents and children hold deeper dramas than those of sexual love. The tales later circulated, by Celsus and others, about Mary and a Roman soldier are by critical consent “clumsy fabrications.”³² Not so awkward are the stories, chiefly contained in the apocryphal or uncanonical gospels, about the birth of Christ in a cave or stable, the adoration of the shepherds and the Magi, the massacre of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt; the mature mind will not resent this popular poetry. The virgin birth is not mentioned by Paul or John; and Matthew and Luke, who tell of it, trace Jesus back to David through Joseph, by conflicting genealogies; apparently the belief in the virgin birth rose later than that in the Davidic descent.

The evangelists tell us little of Christ’s youth. When he was eight days old he was circumcized. Joseph was a carpenter, and the occupational heredity usual in that age suggests that Jesus followed that pleasant trade for a time. He knew the craftsmen of his village, and the landlords, stewards, tenants, and slaves of his rural surroundings; his speech is studded with them. He was sensitive to the natural beauties of the countryside, to the grace and color of flowers, and the silent fruitfulness of trees. The story of his questioning the scholars in the temple is not incredible; he had an alert and curious mind, and in the Near East a boy of twelve already touches maturity. But he had no formal education. “How is it,” his neighbors asked, “that this man can read when he has never gone to school?”³³ He attended the synagogue, and heard the Scriptures with evident delight; the Prophets and the Psalms above all sank deep into his memory, and helped to mold him. Perhaps he read also the books of Daniel and Enoch, for his later teaching was shot through with their visions of the Messiah, the Last Judgment, and the coming Kingdom of God.

The air he breathed was tense with religious excitement. Thousands of Jews awaited anxiously the Redeemer of Israel. Magic and witchcraft, demons and angels, “possession” and exorcism, miracles and prophecies, divination and astrology were taken for granted everywhere; probably the story of the Magi was a necessary concession to the astrological convictions of the age.³⁴ Thaumaturgists—wonder-workers—toured the towns. On the annual journeys that all good Palestinian Jews made to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, Jesus must have learned something of the Essenes, and their half-monastic, almost Buddhistic, life;^* possibly he heard also of a sect called “Nazarenes,” who dwelt beyond the Jordan in Peraea, rejected Temple worship, and denied the binding character of the Law.³⁶ But the experience that aroused him to religious fervor was the preaching of John, the son of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth.

Josephus tells John’s story in some detail.³⁷ We tend to picture the Baptist as an old man; on the contrary, he was apparently of the same age as Jesus. Mark and Matthew describe him as garbed in haircloth, living on dried locusts and honey, standing beside the Jordan, and calling people to repentance. He shared the asceticism of the Essenes, but differed from them in holding one baptism to be enough; his name “the Baptist” may be a Greek equivalent of “Essene” (bather) .³⁸ To his rite of symbolic purification John added a menacing condemnation of hypocrisy and loose living, warned sinners to prepare themselves for the Last Judgment, and proclaimed the early coming of the Kingdom of God.³⁹ If all Judea should repent and be cleansed of sin, said John, the Messiah and the Kingdom would come at once.

In or shortly after “the fifteenth year of Tiberius,” says Luke, Jesus came down to the Jordan to be baptized by John. This decision, by a man now “about thirty years old,”⁴⁰ attested Christ’s acceptance of John’s teaching; his own would be essentially the same. His methods and character, however, were different: he would himself never baptize anyone,⁴¹ and he would live not in the wilderness but in the world. Soon after this meeting Herod Antipas, tetrarch (“ruler of four cities”) of Galilee, ordered the imprisonment of John. The Gospels ascribe the arrest to John’s criticism of Herod’s acts in divorcing his wife and marrying Herodias while she was still the wife of his half brother Philip. Josephus attributes the arrest to Herod’s fear that John was fomenting a political rebellion in the guise of a religious reformation.⁴² Mark⁴³ and Matthew⁴⁴ tell here the story of Salome, Herodias’ daughter, who danced so alluringly before Herod that he offered her any reward she might name. At her mother’s urging, we are told, she asked for the head of John, and the tetrarch reluctantly accommodated her. There is nothing in the Gospels about Salome loving John, nor anything in Josephus about her share in John’s death.

III. THE MISSION

When John was imprisoned Jesus took up the Baptist’s work, and began to preach the coming of the Kingdom.⁴⁵ He “returned to Galilee,” says Luke, “and taught in the synagogues.”⁴⁶ We have an impressive picture of the young idealist taking his turn at reading the Scriptures to the congregation at Nazareth, and choosing a passage from Isaiah:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach glad tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the down-trodden free.⁴⁷

“The eyes of everyone in the synagogue,” Luke adds, “were fixed upon him. And he began by saying to them, ’This passage of Scripture has been fulfilled here in your hearing today.’ And they all spoke well of him, and were astonished at the winning words that fell from his lips.”⁴⁸ When the news came that John had been beheaded, and his followers sought a new leader, Jesus assumed the burden and the risk, at first retiring cautiously to quiet villages, always refraining from political controversy, then more and more boldly proclaiming the gospel of repentance, belief, and salvation. Some of his hearers thought he was John risen from the dead.⁴⁹

It is difficult to see him objectively, not only because the evidence is derived from those who worshiped him, but even more because our own moral heritage and ideals are so closely bound up with him and formed on his example that we feel injured in finding any flaw in his character. His religious sensitivity was so keen that he condemned severely those who would not share his vision; he could forgive any fault but unbelief. There are in the Gospels some bitter passages quite out of key with what else we are told about Christ. He seems to have taken over without scrutiny the harshest contemporary notions of an everlasting hell where unbelievers and unrepentant sinners would suffer from inextinguishable fire and insatiable worms.⁵⁰ He tells without protest how the poor man in heaven was not permitted to let a single drop of water fall upon the tongue of the rich man in hell.⁵¹ He counsels nobly, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” but he cursed the men and cities that would not receive his gospel, and the fig tree that bore no fruit.⁵² He may have been a bit harsh to his mother.⁵³ He had the puritan zeal of the Hebrew prophet rather than the broad calm of the Greek sage. His convictions consumed him; righteous indignation now and then blurred his profound humanity; his faults were the price he paid for that passionate faith which enabled him to move the world.

For the rest he was the most lovable of men. We have no portrait of him, nor do the evangelists describe him; but he must have had some physical comeliness, as well as spiritual magnetism, to attract so many women as well as men. We gather from stray words⁵⁴ that, like other men of that age and land, he wore a tunic under a cloak, had sandals on his feet, and probably a cloth headdress falling over his shoulders to shield him from the sun.⁵⁵ Many women sensed in him a sympathetic tenderness that aroused in them an unstinted devotion. The fact that only John tells the story of the woman taken in adultery is no argument against its truth; it does not help John’s theology, and is completely in character with Christ.^* Of like beauty, and hardly within the inventive powers of the evangelists, is the account of the prostitute who, moved by his ready acceptance of repentant sinners, knelt before him, anointed his feet with precious myrrh, let her tears fall upon them, and dried them with her hair; of her Jesus said that her sins were forgiven “because she loved much.”⁵⁷ We are told that mothers brought their children to be touched by him, and “he took the children in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.”⁵⁸

Unlike the prophets, the Essenes, and the Baptist, he was no ascetic. He is represented as providing abundant wine for a marriage feast, as living with “publicans and sinners,” and receiving a Magdalene into his company. He was not hostile to the simple joys of life, though he was unbiologically harsh on the desire of a man for a maid. Occasionally he partook of banquets in the homes of rich men. Generally, however, he moved among the poor, even among the almost untouchable Amhaarez so scorned and shunned by Sadducees and Pharisees alike. Realizing that the rich would never accept him, he built his hopes upon an overturn that would make the poor and humble supreme in the coming Kingdom. He resembled Caesar only in taking his stand with the lower classes, and in the quality of mercy; otherwise what a world of outlook, character, and interests separated them! Caesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lessen laws, by changing men. Caesar too was capable of anger, but his emotions were always under the control of his clear-eyed intellect. Jesus was not without intellect; he answered the tricky questions of the Pharisees with almost a lawyer’s skill, and yet with wisdom; no one could confuse him, even in the face of death. But his powers of mind were not intellectual, did not depend upon knowledge; they were derived from keenness of perception, intensity of feeling, and singleness of purpose. He did not claim omniscience; he could be surprised by events; only his earnestness and enthusiasm led him to overestimate his capacities, as in Nazareth and Jerusalem. That his powers were nevertheless exceptional seems proved by his miracles.

Probably these were in most cases the result of suggestion—the influence of a strong and confident spirit upon impressionable souls. His presence was itself a tonic; at his optimistic touch the weak grew strong and the sick were made well. The fact that like stories have been told of other characters in legend and history⁵⁹ does not prove that the miracles of Christ were myths. With a few exceptions they are not beyond belief; similar phenomena may be observed almost any day at Lourdes, and doubtless occurred in Jesus’ time at Epidaurus and other centers of psychic healing in the ancient world; the apostles too would work such cures. The psychological nature of the miracles is indicated by two features: Christ himself attributed his cures to the “faith” of those whom he healed; and he could not perform miracles in Nazareth, apparently because the people there looked upon him as “the carpenter’s son,” and refused to believe in his unusual powers; hence his remark that “a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house.”⁶⁰ We are told of Mary Magdalene that “seven demons had been driven out of her”; i.e., she suffered from nervous diseases and seizures (the word recalls the theory of “possession”); these seemed to abate in the presence of Jesus; therefore she loved him as one who had restored her to life, and whose nearness was indispensable to her sanity. In the case of Jairus’ daughter Christ said frankly that the girl was not dead but asleep—perhaps in a cataleptic state; in calling upon her to awake he used not his wonted gentleness but the sharp command, “Little girl, get up!”⁶¹ This is not to say that Jesus considered his miracles to be purely natural phenomena; he felt that he could work them only through the help of a divine spirit within him. We do not know that he was wrong, nor can we yet set limits to the powers that lie potential in the thought and will of man. Jesus himself seems to have experienced a psychical exhaustion after his miracles. He was reluctant to attempt them, forbade his followers to advertise them, reproved men for requiring a “sign,” and regretted that even his apostles accepted him chiefly because of the “wonders” he performed.

These men were hardly of the type that one would have chosen to remold the world. The Gospels realistically differentiate their characters, and honestly expose their faults. They were frankly ambitious; to quiet them Jesus promised that at the Last Judgment they would sit upon twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.⁶² When the Baptist was imprisoned one of his followers, Andrew, attached himself to Jesus, and brought with him his brother Simon, whom Christ called Cephas—“the rock”; the Greeks translated the name into Petros. Peter is a thoroughly human figure, impulsive, earnest, generous, jealous, at times timid to the point of a forgivable cowardice. He and Andrew were fishermen on the Lake of Galilee; so were the two sons of Zebedee—James and John; these four forsook their work and their families to become an inner circle about Christ. Matthew was the collector of customs at the frontier town of Capernaum; he was a “publican”—i.e., a man engaged in public or state business, therefore in this case serving Rome, and hated by every Jew who longed for freedom. Judas of Kerioth was the only one of the apostles who did not come from Galilee. The Twelve pooled their material possessions, and entrusted Judas with their common funds. As they followed Christ in his missionary wandering they lived on the country, taking their food now and then from the fields they passed, and accepting the hospitality of converts and friends. In addition to the Twelve Jesus appointed seventy-two others as disciples, and sent two of them to each town that he intended to visit. He bade them “carry no purse, nor wallet, nor shoes.”⁶³ Kindly and pious women joined the apostles and disciples, contributed to their support, and performed for them those solicitous domestic functions which are the supreme consolation of male life. Through that little band, lowly and letterless, Christ sent his gospel into the world.

IV. THE GOSPEL

He taught with the simplicity required by his audiences, with interesting stories that insinuated his lessons into the understanding, with pungent aphorisms rather than with reasoned argument, and with similes and metaphors as brilliant as any in literature. The parable form that he used was customary in the East, and some of his fetching analogies had come down to him, perhaps unconsciously, from the prophets, the psalmists, and the rabbis; ⁶⁴ nevertheless, the directness of his speech, the vivid colors of his imagery, the warm sincerity of his nature lifted his utterances to the most inspired poetry. Some of his sayings are obscure, some seem at first sight unjust,⁶⁵ some are sharp with sarcasm and bitterness; nearly all of them are models of brevity, clarity, and force.

His starting point was the Gospel of John the Baptist, which itself went back to Daniel and Enoch; historia non facit saltum. The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, he said; soon God would put an end to the reign of wickedness on earth; the Son of Man would come “on the clouds of the sky” to judge all humanity, living and dead.⁶⁶ The time for repentance was running out; those who repented, lived justly, loved God, and put their faith in his messenger would inherit the Kingdom, would be raised to power and glory in a world at last freed from all evil, suffering, and death.

As these ideas were familiar to his hearers, Christ did not define them clearly, and many difficulties obscure his conception now. What did he mean by the Kingdom? A supernatural heaven? Apparently not, for the apostles and the early Christians unanimously expected an earthly kingdom. This was the Jewish tradition that Christ inherited; and he taught his followers to pray to the Father, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Only after that hope had faded did the Gospel of John make Jesus say, “My kingdom is not of this world.”⁶⁷ Did he mean a spiritual condition, or a material utopia? At times he spoke of the Kingdom as a state of soul reached by the pure and sinless ⁶⁸—“the Kingdom of God is within you”;⁶⁹ at other times he pictured it as a happy future society in which the apostles would be rulers, and those who had given or suffered for Christ’s sake would receive a hundredfold reward.⁷⁰ He seems to have thought of moral perfection as only metaphorically the Kingdom, as the preparation and price for the Kingdom, and as the condition of all saved souls in the Kingdom when realized.⁷¹

When would the Kingdom come? Soon. “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.”⁷² “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel,” he told his followers, “till the Son of Man is come.”⁷³ Later he deferred it a bit: “There be some standing here that shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in the Kingdom”;⁷⁴ and “this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.”⁷⁵ In more politic moments he warned his apostles: “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”⁷⁶ Certain signs would precede the coming: “wars and rumors of war . . . nation will rise against nation . . . there will be famines and earthquakes . . . many shall be offended, and . . . shall hate one another. Many false prophets will appear, many will be misled by them; and because of the increase of wickedness most men’s love will grow cold.”⁷⁷ Sometimes Jesus made the advent of the Kingdom depend and wait upon the conversion of man to God and justice; usually he made its coming an act of God, a sudden and miraculous gift of divine grace.

Many have interpreted the Kingdom as a communist utopia, and have seen in Christ a social revolutionist.⁷⁸ The Gospels provide some evidence for this view. Christ obviously scorned the man whose chief purpose in life is to amass money and luxuries.⁷⁹ He promised hunger and woe to the rich and filled, and comforted the poor with Beatitudes that pledged them the Kingdom. To the rich youth who asked what he should do besides keeping the commandments, Christ answered: “Sell your property, give your money to the poor, and . . . follow me.”⁸⁰ Apparently the apostles interpreted the Kingdom as a revolutionary inversion of the existing relationships between the rich and the poor; we shall find them and the early Christians forming a communistic band which “had all things in common.”⁸¹ The charge on which Jesus was condemned was that he had plotted to make himself “King of the Jews.”

But a conservative can also quote the New Testament to his purpose. Christ made a friend of Matthew, who continued to be an agent of the Roman power; he uttered no criticism of the civil government, took no known part in the Jewish movement for national liberation, and counseled a submissive gentleness hardly smacking of political revolution. He advised the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”⁸² His story of the man who, before going on a journey, “called on his slaves, and put his property in their hands,”⁸³ contains no complaint against interest or slavery, but takes these institutions for granted. Christ apparently approves of the slave who invested the ten minas ($600) that the master had entrusted to him, and made ten more; he disapproves of the slave who, left with one mina, held it in unproductive safekeeping against the master’s return; and he puts into the master’s mouth the hard saying that “to him who has, more will be given, and from him who has nothing, even that which he has will be taken away”⁸⁴—an excellent summary of market operations, if not of world history. In another parable workers “grumbled at their employer,” who paid as much to one who had labored an hour as to those who had toiled all day; Christ makes the employer answer: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?”⁸⁵ Jesus does not seem to have thought of ending poverty; “the poor ye have always with you.” He takes for granted, like all ancients, that a slave’s duty is to serve his master well; “blessed is the slave whom his master, returning, finds performing his charge.”⁸⁶ He is not concerned to attack existing economic or political institutions; on the contrary, he condemns those ardent souls who would “take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.”⁸⁷ The revolution he sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come of itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disappear. Since this would be the profoundest of all revolutions, beside which all others would be mere coups d’état of class ousting class and exploiting in its turn, Christ was in this spiritual sense the greatest revolutionist in history.

His achievement lay not in ushering in a new state, but in outlining an ideal morality. His ethical code was predicated on the early coming of the Kingdom,⁸⁸ and was designed to make men worthy of entering it. Hence the Beatitudes, with their unprecedented exaltation of humility, poverty, gentleness, and peace; the counsel to turn the other cheek, and be as little children (no paragons of virtue!); the indifference to economic provision, property, government; the preference of celibacy to marriage; the command to abandon all family ties: these were not rules for ordinary life, they were a semimonastic regimen fitting men and women for election by God into an imminent Kingdom in which there would be no law, no marriage, no sexual relations, no property, and no war. Jesus praised those who “leave house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children,” even those “who make themselves eunuchs, for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake”;⁸⁹ obviously this was intended for a devoted religious minority, not for a continuing society. It was an ethic limited in purpose but universal in its scope, for it applied the conception of brotherhood and the Golden Rule to foreigners and enemies as well as to neighbors and friends. It visioned a time when men would worship God not in temples but “in spirit and truth,” in every deed rather than in passing words.

Were these moral ideas new? Nothing is new except arrangement. The central theme of Christ’s preaching—the coming Judgment and Kingdom—was already a century old among the Jews. The Law had long since inculcated brotherhood: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” said Leviticus; even “the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.”⁹⁰ Exodus had commanded the Jews to do good to their enemies: a good Jew will restore the straying ox or ass even of the “enemy that hateth thee.”⁹¹ The prophets, too, had ranked a good life above all ritual; and Isaiah⁹⁴ and Hosea⁹⁵ had begun to change Yahveh from a Lord of Hosts into a God of Love. Hillel, like Confucius, had phrased the Golden Rule. We must not hold it against Jesus that he inherited and used the rich moral lore of his people.

For a long time Christ thought of himself purely as a Jew, sharing the ideas of the prophets, continuing their work, and preaching like them only to Jews. In dispatching his disciples to spread his gospel he sent them only to Jewish cities; “go not into the way of the gentiles, nor into the city of the Samaritans”;⁹⁶ hence the apostles, after his death, hesitated to bring the Good News to the “heathen” world.⁹⁷ When he met the Samaritan woman at the well he told her, “Salvation is of the Jews”⁹⁸—though we must not judge him from words perhaps put into his mouth by one who was not present, and who wrote sixty years after the event. When a Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter, he at first refused, saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”⁹⁹ He told the leper whom he had cured to “go to the priest and . . . offer the gift that Moses prescribed.”¹⁰⁰ “Do everything that the scribes and Pharisees tell you, and observe it all; but do not do as they do.”¹⁰¹ In suggesting modifications and mitigations of the Judaic Law Jesus, like Hillel, did not think that he was overthrowing it; “I came not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill it.”¹⁰² “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle ^* of the Law to fail.”¹⁰³†

Nevertheless, he transformed everything by the force of his character and his feeling. He added to the Law the injunction to prepare for the Kingdom by a life of justice, kindliness, and simplicity. He hardened the Law in matters of sex and divorce,¹⁰⁵ but softened it toward a readier forgiveness,¹⁰⁶ and reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for man.¹⁰⁷ He relaxed the code of diet and cleanliness, and omitted certain fasts. He brought religion back from ritual to righteousness, and condemned conspicuous prayers, showy charities, and ornate funerals. He left the impression, at times, that the Judaic Law would be abrogated by the coming of the Kingdom.¹⁰⁸

Jews of all sects except the Essenes opposed his innovations, and especially resented his assumption of authority to forgive sins and to speak in the name of God. They were shocked to see him associate with the hated employees of Rome, and with women of low repute. The priests of the Temple and the members of the Sanhedrin watched his activity with suspicion; like Herod with John, they saw in it the semblance or cover of a political revolution; they feared lest the Roman procurator should accuse them of neglecting their responsibility for maintaining social order. They were a bit frightened by Christ’s promise to destroy the Temple, and not quite sure that it was only a metaphor. For his part Christ denounced them in sharp and bitter terms:

The scribes and Pharisees . . . put heavy loads of the Law upon men’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. They do everything they do to have men see it. They wear wide Scripture texts as charms, and large tassels, and they like the best places at dinners and the front seats in the synagogues. . . . But alas for you hypocritical scribes and Pharisees . . . you blind guides . . . blind fools! . . . You let the weightier matters of the Law go—justice, mercy, and integrity. . . . You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. . . . You hypocritical scribes and Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs! . . . Outwardly you appear to men to be upright, but within you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. . . . You are descended from the murderers of the prophets. Go on and fill up the measure of your forefathers’ guilt! You serpents! You brood of snakes! How can you escape being sentenced to the pit? . . . The publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.¹⁰⁹

Was Jesus just to the Pharisees? Probably there were some among them who deserved this castigation, many who, like numberless Christians a few centuries later, substituted outward piety for inward grace. But there were also many Pharisees who agreed that the Law should be softened and humanized.¹¹⁰ Very likely a large number of the sect were sincere men, reasonably decent and honorable, who felt that the ceremonial laws neglected by Jesus should be judged not in themselves but as part of a code that served to hold the Jews together, in pride and decency, amid a hostile world. Some of the Pharisees sympathized with Jesus, and came to warn him that plots were being made to kill him.¹¹¹ Nicodemus, one of the defenders of Jesus, was a rich Pharisee.

The final break came from Jesus’ growing conviction and clear announcement that he was the Messiah. At first his followers had looked upon him as the successor to John the Baptist; gradually they came to believe that he was the long-awaited Redeemer who would raise Israel out of Roman bondage and establish the reign of God on earth. “Lord,” they asked him, “will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”¹¹² He put them off by saying, “It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father has set”; and he gave an equally vague answer to emissaries of the Baptist who asked him, “Art thou he that was to come?” To turn his followers from their conception of him as a political Messiah, he repudiated all claim to Davidic descent.¹¹³ Gradually, however, the intense expectatioris of his followers, and his discovery of his unusual psychic powers, seem to have persuaded him that he had been sent by God, not to restore the sovereignty of Judea, but to prepare men for the reign of God on earth. He did not (in the synoptic Gospels) identify or equate himself with the Father. “Why do you call me good?” he asked; “there is none good but one, that is God.”¹¹⁴ “Not as I will,” he prayed in Gethsemane, “but as thou wilt.”¹¹⁵ He took the phrase “Son of Man,” which Daniel¹¹⁶ had made a synonym for the Messiah, used it at first without clearly meaning himself, and ended by applying it to himself in such statements as “The Son of Man is master of the Sabbath”¹¹⁷—which seemed high blasphemy to the Pharisees. He called God “Father” at times in no exclusive sense; occasionally, however, he spoke of “my Father,” apparently signifying that he was the son of God in an especial manner or degree.¹¹⁸ For a long time he forbade the disciples to call him the Messiah; but at Caesarea Philippi he approved Peter’s recognition of him as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”¹¹⁹ When, on the last Monday before his death, he approached Jerusalem to make a final appeal to the people, “the whole throng of his disciples” greeted him with the words, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord”; and when some Pharisees asked him to reprove this salutation, he answered, “I tell you, if they keep silence, the stones will cry out.”¹²⁰ The Fourth Gospel reports that the crowd hailed him as “King of Israel.”¹²¹ Apparently his followers still thought of him as a political Messiah, who would overthrow the Roman power and make Judea supreme. It was these acclamations that doomed Christ to a revolutionist’s death.

V. DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

The Feast of the Passover was at hand, and great numbers of Jews were gathering in Jerusalem to offer sacrifice in the Temple. The outer court of the shrine was noisy with vendors selling doves and other sacrificial animals, and with money-changers offering locally acceptable currency for the idolatrous coins of the Roman realm. Visiting the Temple on the day after his entry into the city, Jesus was shocked by the clamor and commercialism of the booths. In a burst of indignation he and his followers overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the dove merchants, scattered their coins on the ground, and with “a scourge of rods” drove the traders from the court. For several days thereafter he taught in the Temple, unhindered; ¹²² but at night he left Jerusalem and stayed on the Mount of Olives, fearing arrest or assassination.

The agents of the government—civil and ecclesiastical, Roman and Jewish—had kept watch on him probably from the time when he had taken up the mission of John the Baptist. His failure to secure a large following had inclined them to ignore him; but his enthusiastic reception in Jerusalem seems to have set the Jewish leaders wondering whether this excitement, working upon the emotional and patriotic Passover throngs, might flare up into an untimely and futile revolt against the Roman power, and issue in the suppression of all self-government and religious freedom in Judea. The high priest called a meeting of the Sanhedrin, and expressed the opinion “that one man should die for the people, instead of the whole nation being destroyed.”¹²³ The majority agreed with him, and the Council ordered the arrest of Christ.

Some news of this decision seems to have reached Jesus, perhaps through members of the Sanhedrin minority. On the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan (our April third), probably in the year 30,^* Jesus and his apostles ate the Seder, or Passover supper, in the home of a friend in Jerusalem. They looked to the Master to free himself by his miraculous powers; he, on the contrary, accepted his fate, and perhaps hoped that his death would be received by God as a sacrificial atonement for the sins of his people.¹²⁴ He had been informed that one of the Twelve was conspiring to betray him; and at this last supper he openly accused Judas Iscariot.^* In accord with Jewish ritual Jesus blessed (in Greek, eucharistisae) the wine that he gave the apostles to drink; and then they sang together the Jewish ritual song Hallel.¹²⁷ He told them, says John, that he would be with them “only a little longer. ... I give you a new command: Love one another. . . . Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God and believe in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions ... I go to prepare a place for you.”¹²⁸ It seems quite credible that in so solemn a moment he should ask them to repeat this supper periodically (as Jewish custom required), in commemoration of him; and not improbable that, with Oriental intensity of feeling and imagery, he asked them to think of the bread they ate as his body, and of the wine they drank as his blood.

That night, we are told, the little band hid in the Garden of Gethsemane, outside Jerusalem. There a detachment of Temple¹²⁹ police found them, and arrested Jesus. He was taken first to the house of Annas, a former high priest, then to that of Caiaphas; according to Mark the “Council”—probably a committee of the Sanhedrin—had already gathered there. Various witnesses testified against him, especially recalling his threat to destroy the Temple. When Caiaphas asked him whether he was “the Messiah, the Son of God,” Jesus is reported to have answered “I am he.”¹³⁰ In the morning the Sanhedrin met, found him guilty of blasphemy (then a capital crime), and decided to bring him before the Roman procurator, who had come to Jerusalem to keep an eye on the Passover crowds.

Pontius Pilate was a hard man, who would later be summoned to Rome, accused of extortion and cruelty,¹³¹ and removed from office. Nevertheless, it did not seem to him that this mild-mannered preacher was a real danger to the state. “Are you the King of the Jews?” he asked. Jesus, says Matthew,¹³² answered ambiguously, “You have said it (sǔ eipas).” Such details, reported presumably from hearsay and long after the event, must be held suspect; if we accept the text we must conclude that Jesus had resolved to die, and that Paul’s theory of atonement had some support in Christ. John quotes Jesus as adding: “For this I was born ... to give testimony for the truth.” “What is truth?” asked the procurator¹³³—a question perhaps due to the metaphysical propensities of the Fourth Gospel, but well revealing the chasm between the sophisticated and cynical culture of the Roman and the warm and trustful idealism of the Jew. In any case, after Christ’s confession, the law required conviction, and Pilate reluctantly issued the sentence of death.

Crucifixion was a Roman, not a Jewish, form of punishment. It was usually preceded by scourging, which, carried out thoroughly, left the body a mass of swollen and bloody flesh. The Roman soldiers crowned Christ with a wreath of thorns, mocking his royalty as “King of the Jews,” and placed upon his cross an inscription in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin: lesus Nazarathaeus Rex loudaeorum. Whether or not Christ was a revolutionist he was obviously condemned as one by Rome; Tacitus, too, understood the matter so.¹³⁴ A small crowd, such as could gather in Pilate’s courtyard, had called for Christ’s execution; now, however, as he climbed the hill of Golgotha, “he was followed by a great crowd of the people,” says Luke,¹³⁵ and of women who beat their breasts and mourned for him. Quite clearly the condemnation did not have the approval of the Jewish people.

All who cared to witness the horrible spectacle were free to do so; the Romans, who thought it necessary to rule by terror, chose, for capital offenses by other than Roman citizens, what Cicero called “the most cruel and hideous of tortures.”¹³⁶ The offender’s hands and feet were bound (seldom nailed) to the wood; a projecting block supported the backbone or the feet; unless mercifully killed, the victim would linger there for two or three days, suffering the agony of immobility, unable to brush away the insects that fed upon his naked flesh, and slowly losing strength until the heart failed and brought an end. Even the Romans sometimes pitied the victim, and offered him a stupefying drink. The cross, we are told, was raised “at the third hour”—i.e., at nine in the morning. Mark reports that two robbers were crucified with Jesus, and “reviled him”;¹³⁷ Luke assures us that one of them prayed to him.¹³⁸ Of all the apostles only John was present; with him were three Marys—Christ’s mother, her sister Mary, and Mary Magdalene; “there were also some women watching from a distance.”¹³⁹ Following the Roman custom,¹⁴⁰ the soldiers divided the garments of the dying men; and as Christ had but one, they cast lots for it. Possibly we have here an interpolated remembrance of Psalm XXII, 18: “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” The same Psalm begins with the words: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—and this is the desperately human utterance that Mark and Matthew attribute to the dying Christ. Can it be that in those bitter moments the great faith that had sustained him before Pilate faded into black doubt? Luke, perhaps finding such words repugnant to the theology of Paul, substitutes for them: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”—which in turn echoes Psalm XXXI, 5 with suspicious accuracy.

A soldier, pitying Christ’s thirst, held up to his mouth a sponge soaked in sour wine. Jesus drank, and said, “It is consummated.” At the ninth hour—at three in the afternoon—he “cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.” Luke adds—again revealing the sympathy of the Jewish populace—that “all the people that came together to that sight . . . smote their breasts and returned” to the town.¹⁴¹ Two kindly and influential Jews, having secured Pilate’s permission, took the body down from the cross, embalmed it with aloes and myrrh, and placed it in a tomb.

Was he really dead? The two robbers beside him were still alive; their legs were broken by the soldiers so that the weight of the body would hang upon the hands, constricting the circulation and soon stopping the heart. This was not done in Jesus’ case, though we are told that a soldier pierced his breast with a lance, drawing forth first blood and then lymph. Pilate expressed surprise that a man should die after six hours of crucifixion; he gave his consent to Christ’s removal from the cross only when the centurion in charge assured him of Christ’s death.

Two days later Mary Magdalene, whose love of Jesus partook of that nervous intensity which characterized all her feelings, visited the tomb with “Mary the mother of James, and Salome.” They found it empty. “Frightened and yet overjoyed,” they ran to tell the news to the disciples. On the way they met one whom they thought to be Jesus; they bowed down before him and clasped his feet. We can imagine the hopeful incredulity with which their report was greeted; the thought that Jesus had triumphed over death, and had thereby proved himself Messiah and Son of God, filled the “Galileans” with such excitement that they were ready for any miracle and any revelation. That same day, we are told, Christ appeared to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, talked with them, and ate with them; for a long time “they were prevented from recognizing him”; but when “he took the bread and blessed it . . . their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished from them.”¹⁴² The disciples went back to Galilee, and soon thereafter “saw him and bowed down before him, though some were in doubt.”¹⁴³ While they were fishing they saw Christ join them; they cast their nets, and drew in a great haul.¹⁴⁴

Forty days after his appearance to Mary Magdalene, says the beginning of the Book of Acts, Christ ascended physically into heaven. The idea of a saint being so “translated” into the sky in body and life was familiar to the Jews; they told it of Moses, Enoch, Elijah, and Isaiah. The Master went as mystically as he had come; but most of the disciples seem to have been sincerely convinced that he had, after his crucifixion, been with them in the flesh. “They went back with great joy to Jerusalem,” says Luke,¹⁴⁵ “and were constantly in the Temple, blessing God.”

CHAPTER XXVII

The Apostles

A.D. 30-95

I. PETER

CHRISTIANITY arose out of Jewish apocalyptic—esoteric revelations of the coming Kingdom; it derived its impetus from the personality and vision of Christ; it gained strength from the belief in his resurrection, and the promise of eternal life; it received doctrinal form in the theology of Paul; it grew by the absorption of pagan faith and ritual; it became a triumphant Church by inheriting the organizing patterns and genius of Rome.

The apostles were apparently unanimous in believing that Christ would soon return to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.^* “The end of all things is near,” says the first epistle of Peter; “be serious and collected, therefore, and pray.”³ “Children,” says the first epistle of John, “it is the last hour. You have heard that Antichrist was coming, and many Antichrists” (Nero, Vespasian, Domitian?) “have indeed appeared. So we may be sure that it is the last hour.”⁴ The belief in the Messianic mission, bodily resurrection, and earthly return of Christ formed the basic faith of early Christianity. This creed did not prevent the apostles from continuing to accept Judaism. “Day after day,” says Acts, “they all went regularly to the Temple”; ⁵ they obeyed the dietetic and ceremonial laws; ⁶ they proclaimed their faith at first only to Jews, and often preached it in the Temple courts.⁷

They believed that they had received from Christ or the Holy Spirit miraculous powers of inspiration, healing, and speech. Many sick and infirm persons came to them; some were cured, says Mark,⁸ by anointing with oil—always a popular treatment in the East. The author of Acts draws a touching picture of the trustful communism in which these early Christians lived:

There was but one heart and soul in the multitude who had become believers, and not one of them claimed anything that belonged to him as his own, but they shared everything they had with one another. . . . No one among them was in any want, for any who owned lands or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds and put them at the disposal of the Apostles; then they were shared with everyone in proportion to his need.⁹

As the number of proselytes increased, the apostles, by a laying on of hands, ordained seven deacons to administer the affairs of the community. For some time the Jewish authorities tolerated the sect as small and harmless; but as the “Nazarenes” multiplied in a few years from 120 to 8000,¹⁰ the priests became alarmed. Peter and others were arrested and questioned by the Sanhedrin; the Sadducees wished to condemn them to death, but a Pharisee named Gamaliel—probably the teacher of Paul—advised a suspended judgment; as a compromise the prisoners were flogged and released. A little later (A.D. 30?) Stephen, one of the ordained deacons, was summoned before the Sanhedrin on the charge that he had “used abusive language about Moses and about God.”¹¹ He defended himself with reckless vehemence:

You stubborn people, with heathen hearts and ears, you are always opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your forefathers did! Which of the prophets did not your forefathers persecute? They killed the men who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and killed—you who had the Law given you by angels, and did not obey it! ^{12 *}

The Sanhedrin, in a rage, had him dragged outside the city and stoned to death. A young Pharisee named Saul aided the attack; thereafter he went from house to house in Jerusalem, seized adherents of “the Way,” and put them in jail.¹³

The Jewish converts of Greek name and culture, who had had Stephen as their leader, fled to Samaria and Antioch, where they established strong Christian communities. Most of the apostles, apparently spared in this persecution because they still observed the Law, remained in Jerusalem with the Judaic Christians. While Peter carried the Gospel to the towns of Judea, James “the Just,” “the brother of the Lord,” became the head of the now reduced and impoverished church in Jerusalem. James practiced the Law in all its severity, and rivaled the Essenes in asceticism; he ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one garment, and never cut his hair or beard. For eleven years, under his guidance, the Christians were left undisturbed. About 41 another James, the son of Zebedee, was beheaded; Peter was arrested, but escaped. In 62 James the Just was himself put to death. Four years later the Jews revolted against Rome. The Jerusalem Christians, too convinced of the coming “end of the world” to care about politics, left the city and established themselves in pagan and pro-Roman Pella, on the farther bank of the Jordan. From that hour Judaism and Christianity parted. The Jews accused the Christians of treason and cowardice, and the Christians hailed the destruction of the Temple by Titus as a fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy. Mutual hatred enflamed the two faiths, and wrote some of their most pious literature.

Thereafter Judaic Christianity waned in number and power, and yielded the new religion to be transformed by the Greek mind. Galilee, where Christ had lived nearly all his life, and where the Magdalene and the other women who had been among the first to follow him were now lost in obscurity, turned a deaf ear to the preachers who proclaimed the Nazarene as the Son of God. The Jews, who thirsted for liberty, and reminded themselves daily that “the Lord is One,” were repelled by a Messiah who ignored their struggle for independence, and were scandalized by the announcement that a god had been born in a cave or stable in one of their villages. Judaic Christianity survived for five centuries in a little group of Syriac Christians called Ebionim (“the poor”), who practiced Christian poverty and the full Jewish Law. At the end of the second century the Church condemned them as heretics.

Meanwhile the apostles and disciples had spread the Good News, chiefly among the Jews of the Dispersion,¹⁴ from Damascus to Rome. Philip made converts in Samaria and Caesarea, John developed a strong church in Ephesus, and Peter preached in the cities of Syria. Like most of the apostles, Peter took a “sister” with him on his missions to serve as his wife and aide.¹⁵ He healed the sick so successfully that at Samaria a magician, Simon Magus, offered him money for a share in his mysterious powers. At Joppa he raised Tabitha from apparent death; at Caesarea he won a Roman centurion to Christianity. A vision, says the Book of Acts, convinced him that he should accept pagan as well as Jewish converts; and from this time forward, with some amiable vacillations, he contented himself with baptizing, rather than also circumcizing, non-Jewish proselytes. We feel some of the ardor of these early missionaries in the first epistle of Peter:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those [Christian Jews] who are scattered as foreigners over Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia . . . God bless you and give you perfect peace. . . . My dearly beloved, I pray you as aliens and exiles, to live upright lives among the gentiles so that . . . they may, from observing the uprightness of your conduct, come to praise God. . . . Submit to all human authority for the Master’s sake. . . . Live like free men, but do not make your freedom an excuse for wrong doing. . . . Servants, be submissive to your masters, and perfectly respectful to them; not only to those who are kind and considerate, but also to those who are unreasonable. You married women, likewise, must be submissive to your husbands, so that any who refuse to believe . . . may be won over when they see how chaste and submissive you are. You must not adopt the external attractions of arranging your hair or wearing jewelry; you must be a quiet and gentle spirit. You married men also must be considerate to your wives; show deference to women as the weaker sex, sharing the gift of life with you. . . . Return not evil for evil. . . . Above all keep your love for one another strong, for love covers a multitude of sins.¹⁶

We do not know when and by what stages Peter made his way to Rome. Jerome (ca. 390) dates his first arrival there as early as 42. The tradition that he played a leading role in establishing the Christian community in the capital has survived all criticism.¹⁷ Lactantius speaks of Peter’s coming to Rome in Nero’s reign;¹⁸ probably the apostle visited the city on divers occasions. He free and Paul in prison labored as rivals to win converts there, until both of them suffered martyrdom, perhaps in the same year 64.¹⁹ Origen reports that Peter “was crucified head downward, for he had asked that he might suffer that way,”²⁰ perhaps hoping that in that position death would come sooner, or (said the opinion of the faithful) holding himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ. Ancient texts testify that his wife was killed with him and that he had to see her led to execution.²¹ A later story named Nero’s Circus, on the Vatican field, as the place of his death. Over the site the Cathedral of St. Peter rose, and claimed to enshrine his bones.

His missions in Asia Minor and Rome must have helped to preserve many Judaic elements in Christianity. Through him and the other apostles it inherited Jewish monotheism, puritanism, and eschatology. Through them and Paul the Old Testament became the only Bible that first-century Christianity knew. Till 70 Christianity was preached chiefly in synagogues or among Jews. The form, ceremony, and vestments of Hebrew worship passed down into Christian ritual. The Paschal lamb of sacrifice was sublimated in the Agnus Dei—the expiatory Lamb of God—of the Catholic Mass. The appointment of elders (presbyteri, priests) to govern the churches was adopted from Jewish methods of administering the synagogue. Many Judaic festivals—e.g., Passover and Pentecost—were accepted into the Christian calendar, however altered in content and date. The Jewish Dispersion aided the rapid dissemination of Christianity; the frequent movement of Jews from city to city, and their connections throughout the Empire, co-operated with commerce, Roman roads, and the Roman peace, to open a path for the Christian faith. In Christ and Peter Christianity was Jewish; in Paul it became half Greek; in Catholicism it became half Roman. In Protestantism the Judaic element and emphasis were restored.

II. PAUL

1. The Persecutor

The founder of Christian theology was born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, about the tenth year of our era. His father was a Pharisee, and brought up the youth in the fervent principles of that sect; the Apostle of the Gentiles never ceased to consider himself a Pharisee, even after he had rejected the Judaic Law. The father was also a Roman citizen, and transmitted the precious franchise to his son. Probably the name Paul was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Saul, so that both names belonged to the apostle from infancy.²² He did not receive a classical education, for no Pharisee would have permitted such outright Hellenism in his son, and no man with Greek training would have written the bad Greek of the Epistles. Nevertheless, he learned to speak the language with sufficient fluency to address an Athenian audience, and he occasionally referred to famous passages in Greek literature. We may believe that some Stoic theology and ethics passed from the university environment of Tarsus into the Christianity of Paul. So he uses the Stoic term pneuma (breath) for what his English translators call spirit. Like most Greek cities, Tarsus had followers of the Orphic or other mystery religions, who believed that the god they worshiped had died for them, had risen from the grave, and would, if appealed to by lively faith and proper ritual, save them from Hades, and share with them his gift of eternal and blessed life.²³ The mystery religions prepared the Greeks for Paul, and Paul for the Greeks.

After the youth had learned the trade of tentmaking, and had received instruction in the local synagogue, his father sent him to Jerusalem, where, Paul tells us, he was “educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the Law.”²⁴ Gamaliel was reputedly the grandson of Hillel; he succeeded Hillel as president of the Sanhedrin, and carried on the tradition of interpreting the Law with a lenient regard for the frailty of mankind. Stricter Pharisees were shocked to find him gazing appreciatively even upon pagan women.²⁵ He was so learned that the Jews, who keenly honor scholarship, called him “the beauty of the Law,” and gave to him first, as to only six men after him, the title of rabban, “our master.” From him and others Paul learned that shrewd and subtle, sometimes casuistic and sophistical, manner of Biblical interpretation which was to disport itself in the Talmud. Despite Paul’s initiation into Hellenism he remained to the end a Jew in mind and character, uttered no doubt of the Torah’s inspiration, and proudly maintained the divine election of the Jews as the medium of man’s salvation.

He describes himself as “insignificant in appearance,”²⁶ and adds: “to keep me from being too much elated, a bitter physical affliction was sent me”;²⁷ he does not further specify. Tradition pictured him at fifty as a bent and bald and bearded ascetic, with vast forehead, pale face, stern countenance, and piercing eyes; Dürer imagined him so in one of the greatest drawings of all time; but in truth these representations are literature and art, not history.

His mind was of a type frequent among Jews: penetrating and passionate rather than genial and urbane; emotional and imaginative rather than objective and impartial; he was powerful in action because he was narrow in thought. Even more than Spinoza he was a “God-intoxicated man,” consumed with religious enthusiasm in the literal sense of this word—holding “a god within.” He believed himself divinely inspired, and endowed with the ability to work miracles. He was also a practical soul, capable of laborious organization, impatiently patient in founding and preserving Christian communities. As in so many men, his faults and virtues were near allied and mutually indispensable. He was impetuous and courageous, dogmatic and decisive, domineering and energetic, fanatical and creative, proud before man and humble before God, violently wrathful and capable of the tenderest love. He advised his followers to “bless them that persecute you,” but he could hope that his enemies—“the party of circumcision”—“would get themselves emasculated.”²⁸ He knew his failings, struggled against them, and begged his converts to “put up with a little folly from me.”²⁹ The postscript to his first epistle to the Corinthians sums him up: “This farewell I, Paul, add in my own hand. A curse upon anyone who has no love for the Lord! Lord, come quickly! The blessing of the Lord Jesus be with you! My love be with you all.” He was what he had to be to do what he did.

He began by attacking Christianity in the name of Judaism, and ended by rejecting Judaism in the name of Christ; at every moment he was an apostle. Shocked by Stephen’s disrespect for the Law, he joined in killing him, and led the first persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. Hearing that the new faith had made converts in Damascus, he obtained authorization from the high priest to go there, arrest all “who belonged to the Way,” and bring them in chains to Jerusalem (A.D. 31?).³⁰ It may be that the fervor of his persecution was due to secret doubts; he could be cruel, but not without remorse; possibly the vision of Stephen stoned to death, perhaps even some youthful glimpse of Golgotha, troubled his memory and his journey, and fevered his imagination. As his party neared Damascus, says the Acts,

a sudden light flashed upon him from heaven, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, sir?” he asked. “I am Jesus,”. . . said the voice. . . . Saul’s fellow-travelers stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could not see anyone. When he got up from the ground and opened his eyes he could see nothing. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. For three days he could not see.³¹

No one can say what natural processes underlay this pivotal experience The fatigue of a long journey, the strength of the desert sun, perhaps a stroke of heat lightning in the sky, acting by accumulation upon a frail and possibly epileptic body, and a mind tortured by doubt and guilt, may have brought to culmination the half-conscious process by which the passionate denier became the ablest preacher of Stephen’s Christ. His Greek environment in Tarsus had spoken of a Soter or Saviour who redeemed mankind; his Jewish lore had told of a Messiah to come; how could he be sure that this mysterious and fascinating Jesus, for whom men were ready to die, was not the promised one? When, weak and still blind at the end of his journey, he felt upon his face the kindly, soothing hands of a converted Jew, “something like scales dropped from his eyes, and his sight was restored; he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, regained his strength.”³² A few days later he entered the synagogues of Damascus, and told their congregations that Jesus was the Son of God.

2. The Missionary

The governor of Damascus, urged by the offended Jews, issued an order for Paul’s arrest; Paul’s new friends lowered him in a basket over the city walls. For three years, he tells us, he preached Christ in the hamlets of Arabia. Returning to Jerusalem, he won the forgiveness and friendship of Peter, and lived with him for a while. Most of the apostles distrusted him, but Barnabas, himself a recent convert, gave him a cordial hand, and persuaded the Jerusalem church to commission its persecutor as a bearer of the Good News that the Messiah had come and would soon establish the Kingdom. The Greek-speaking Jews to whom he brought the Gospel tried to kill him, and the apostles, perhaps fearing that his ardor would endanger them all, sent him to Tarsus.

For eight years he was lost to history in his native city; and perhaps again he felt the influence of the mystic salvation theology popular among the Greeks. Then Barnabas came and asked his aid in ministering to the church at Antioch. Working together (43-44?), they made so many converts that Antioch soon led all other cities in the number of its Christians. There for the first time the “Believers,” “Disciples,” “Brethren,” or “Saints,” as they had called themselves, received from the pagans, perhaps in scorn, the name Christianoi—followers of the Messiah or Anointed One. There too, for the first time, gentiles (i.e., people of the gentes or nations) were won to the new faith. Most of these were “God-fearers,” predominantly women, who had already accepted the monotheism, and in some part the ritual, of the Jews.

The Antioch converts were not as poor as those in Jerusalem; a considerable minority belonged to the merchant class. With the enthusiasm of a youthful and growing movement, they raised a fund to spread the Gospel. The elders of the church “laid their hands upon” Barnabas and Paul, and sent them out on what history, unduly belittling Barnabas, calls the “first missionary journey of Saint Paul” (45-47?). They sailed to Cyprus, and met with encouraging success among the many Jews of that island. From Paphos they took ship to Perga in Pamphylia, and traveled over dangerous mountain roads to Antioch in Pisidia. The synagogue gave them a courteous hearing; but when they began to preach to gentiles as well, the orthodox Jews persuaded the municipal officers to banish the missionaries. Similar difficulties developed at Iconium; and at Lystra Paul was stoned, dragged out of the town, and left for dead. Still “full of the joy of the Holy Spirit,” Paul and Barnabas carried the Gospel to Derbe. Then they returned by the same route to Perga, and sailed to Syrian Antioch. There they found themselves faced by the most crucial problem in the history of Christianity.

For some leading disciples of Jerusalem, hearing that the two preachers were accepting gentile converts without requiring circumcision, had come to Antioch “to teach the brethren that unless they were circumcized as Moses prescribed, they could not be saved.”³³ To the Jew circumcision was not so much a ritual of health as a holy symbol of his people’s ancient covenant with God; and the Christian Jew was appalled at the thought of breaking that covenant. For their part Paul and Barnabas realized that if these emissaries had their way, Christianity would never be accepted by any significant number of gentiles; it would remain “a Jewish heresy” (as Heine was to call it), and would fade out in a century. They went down to Jerusalem (50?) and fought the matter out with the apostles, nearly all of whom were still faithful worshipers in the Temple. James was reluctant to consent; Peter defended the two missionaries; finally it was agreed that pagan proselytes should be required only to abstain from immorality and from the eating of sacrificial or strangled animals.³⁴ Apparently Paul eased the way by promising financial support for the impoverished community at Jerusalem from the swelling funds of the Antioch church.³⁵

The issue, however, was too vital to be so easily laid. A second group of orthodox Jewish Christians came from Jerusalem to Antioch, found Peter eating with gentiles, and persuaded him to separate himself, with the converted Jews, from the uncircumcized proselytes. We do not know Peter’s side of this episode; Paul tells us that “he withstood Peter to his face” at Antioch,³⁶ and accused him of hypocrisy; perhaps Peter had merely wished, like Paul, to be “all things to all men.”

Probably in the year 50 Paul left on his second missionary journey. He had quarreled with Barnabas, who now disappeared from history in his native Cyprus. Revisiting his churches in Asia Minor, Paul attached to himself at Lystra a young disciple named Timothy, whom he came to love with a profound affection that had long been starved for an object. Together they went through Phrygia and Galatia as far north as Alexandria Troas. Here Paul made the acquaintance of Luke, an uncircumcized proselyte to Judaism, a man of good mind and heart, probably the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts—both designed to soften the conflicts that from the beginning marked the history of Christianity. From Troas Paul, Timothy, and another aide, Silas, sailed to Macedonia, for the first time touching European soil. At Philippi, where Antony had conquered Brutus, Paul and Silas were arrested as disturbers of the peace, were scourged and jailed, but were freed on the discovery that they were Roman citizens. Passing on to Thessalonica, Paul went to the synagogue, and for three Sabbaths preached to the Jews. A few were convinced, and organized a church; others roused the town against Paul on the ground that he was proclaiming a new king; and his friends had to spirit him away to Beraea during the night. There “the Jews received the message with great eagerness”; but the Thessalonians came to denounce Paul as an enemy of Judaism, and he took ship for Athens (51?), discouraged and alone.

Here, in the heart of pagan religion, science, and philosophy, he found himself quite friendless. There were few Jews to give him a hearing; he had to take his stand in the market place, like any modern haranguer of city crowds, and compete with a dozen rivals for passing ears. Some listeners argued with him; some laughed at him, and asked, “What is this ragpicker trying to make out?”³⁷ Several were interested, and led him up to the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars, for a quieter hearing. He told them how he had noted, in Athens, an altar inscribed “To an Unknown God”; this dedication, which probably expressed the desire of the donors to thank, appease, or enlist the aid of a god of whose name they were not certain, Paul interpreted as a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of God. He proceeded with high eloquence:

Whom therefore ye worship though ye know him not, him I declare unto you. God, who made the world and all things therein . . . dwells not in temples made with hands. ... It is he that giveth life and breath unto all. . . . And he made of one blood all the nations of mankind . . . that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him, though he be not far from us; for in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said.^* . . . Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by the art and device of man. Howbeit, those past times of ignorance God hath overlooked; but now he commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world ... by that Man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he hath raised him from the dead.³⁸

It was a brave effort to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy.† Nevertheless, it impressed only a few; the Athenians had heard too many ideas to have much enthusiasm for any. Paul left the city in disappointment and went to Corinth, where commerce had gathered a substantial community of Jews. He stayed there eighteen months (51-52?), earning his living as a tentmaker, and preaching every Sabbath in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue was converted, and so many others that the alarmed Jews indicted Paul before the Roman governor, Gallio, on the charge of “trying to induce people to worship God in ways that are against the law.” Gallio replied: “As it is only a question of words and titles and your own law, you must look after it yourselves; I will not decide such matters”; and he dismissed them from the court. The two parties fell to blows, “but Gallio paid no attention.”³⁹ Paul offered his gospel to the gentiles of Corinth, and made many converts among them. Christianity may have seemed to them an acceptable variation of the mystery faiths that had so often told them of resurrected saviors; possibly in accepting it they assimilated it to these beliefs, and influenced Paul to interpret Christianity in terms familiar to the Hellenistic mind.

From Corinth Paul went to Jerusalem (53?) to “salute the church.” Soon, however, he was off on his third missionary journey, visiting the Christian communities in Antioch and Asia Minor, and reinvigorating them with his fervor and confidence. At Ephesus he spent two years, and “did such extraordinary wonders” that many looked upon him as a miracle-worker, and sought to cure ailments by applying to the sick the linens Paul had used. The manufacturers of the images that pagan worshipers dedicated in the Temple of Artemis found their trade slackening; perhaps Paul had repeated here his Athenian indictment of image worship, or idolatry. One Demetrius, who made silver models of the great shrine for pious pilgrims, organized a protest against Paul and the new faith, and led to the city theater a crowd of Greeks whose catchword, repeated for two hours, was “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” A local official dissolved the gathering, but Paul thought it the better part of valor to leave for Macedonia.

He spent some happy months with the little congregations he had founded in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beraea. Hearing that dissension and immorality were disordering the church at Corinth, he not only reprimanded it in several epistles, but went down to it in person (56?) to face his detractors. They had accused him of profiting materially from his preaching, laughed at his visions, and renewed the demand that all Christians should obey the Jewish Law. Paul reminded the turbulent community that he had everywhere earned his living with the work of his hands; and as to material profit, what had he not suffered from his missions?—eight floggings, one stoning, three shipwrecks, and a thousand dangers from robbers, patriots, and streams.⁴⁰ Amid this turmoil word was brought him that the “party of the circumcision,” apparently violating the Jerusalem agreement, had gone into Galatia and demanded of all converts the full acceptance of the Jewish Law. He wrote to the Galatians a wrathful epistle in which he broke completely with the Judaizing Christians, and declared that men were to be saved not by adherence to the Mosaic Law, but by an active faith in Christ as the redeeming Son of God. Then, not knowing what sharper tribulations awaited him there, he left for Jerusalem, eager to defend himself before the Apostles, and wishing to celebrate in the Holy City the ancient feast of Pentecost. From Jerusalem, he hoped, he might go to Rome, even to Spain, and never rest till every province of the Empire had heard the news and promise of the risen Christ.

3. The Theologian

The leaders of the mother church gave him “a hearty welcome” (57?); but privately they admonished him:

You see, brother, how many thousand believers there are among the Jews, all of them zealous upholders of the Law. They have been told that you teach all Jews who live among the heathen to turn away from Moses, that you tell them not to circumcize their children, nor to observe the old customs. . . . They will be sure to hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men here who are under a vow. Join them, undergo the rites of purification with them, and pay their expenses. . . . Then everybody will understand that there is no truth in the stories told about you, but that you yourself observe the Law.⁴¹

Paul took the advice in good spirit, and went through the rites of purification. But when some Jews saw him in the Temple they raised an outcry against him as “the man who teaches everybody everywhere against our people and the Law.” A mob seized him, dragged him from the Temple, and “were trying to kill him” when a squad of Roman soldiers rescued him by arrest. Paul turned to speak to the crowd, and affirmed both his Judaism and his Christianity. They shouted for his death. The Roman officer ordered him to be flogged, but desisted when he learned of Paul’s Roman citizenship. The next day he brought the prisoner before the Sanhedrin. Paul addressed it, proclaimed himself a Pharisee, and won some support; but his excited opponents again sought to do him violence, and the officer withdrew him into the barracks. That night a nephew of Paul came to warn him that forty Jews had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed him. The officer, fearing a disturbance that would compromise him, sent Paul in the night to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.

Five days later the high priest and some elders came up from Jerusalem, and accused Paul of being “a pest and a disturber of the peace among Jews all over the world.” Paul admitted that he was preaching a new religion, but added: “I believe everything that is taught in the Law.” Felix dismissed the accusers; nevertheless, he kept Paul under house arrest—accessible to friends—for two years (58-60?), hoping, perhaps, for a substantial bribe.

When Festus succeeded Felix he suggested that Paul should stand trial before him at Jerusalem. Fearing that hostile environment, Paul exercised his rights as a Roman citzen, and demanded trial before the emperor. King Agrippa, passing through Caesarea, gave him another hearing, and judged him “mad with great learning,” but otherwise innocent; “he might be let go,” said Agrippa, “if he had not appealed to the emperor.” Paul was put on a trading vessel, which sailed so leisurely that it encountered a winter storm before it could reach Italy. Through fourteen days of tempest, we are told, he gave crew and passengers an encouraging example of a man superior to death and confident of rescue. The ship broke to pieces on Malta’s rocks, but all on board swam safely to shore. Three months later Paul arrived in Rome (61?).

The Roman authorities treated him leniently, awaiting his accusers from Palestine, and Nero’s leisure to hear the case. He was allowed to live in a house of his choosing, with a soldier to guard him; he could not move about freely, but he could receive whomever he wished. He invited the leading Jews of Rome to come to him; they heard him patiently, but when they perceived that in his judgment the observance of the Jewish Law was not necessary to salvation, they turned away; the Law seemed to them the indispensable prop and solace of Jewish life. “Understand, then,” said Paul, “that this message of God’s salvation has been sent to the heathen. They will listen to it!”⁴² His attitude offended also the Christian community that he found in Rome. These converts, chiefly Jews, preferred the Christianity that had been brought to them from Jerusalem; they practiced circumcision, and were hardly distinguished by Rome from the orthodox Jews; they welcomed Peter, but were cold to Paul. He made some converts among the gentiles, even in high place; but a bitter sense of frustration darkened the loneliness of his imprisonment.

He found some solace in sending long and tender letters to his distant flocks. For ten years now he had written such epistles; there were doubtless many more than have come down to us under his name.^* They did not come directly from his pen; he dictated them, often adding a postscript in his own rough hand; he left them apparently unrevised, with all their repetitions, obscurities, and bad grammar on their head. Nevertheless, the depth and sincerity of their feeling, their angry devotion to a great cause, their profusion of noble and memorable speech make them the most forceful and eloquent letters in all literature; even Cicero’s charm seems slight beside this passionate faith. Here are strong words of love from one to whom his churches were his fiercely protected children; violent attacks upon his numberless enemies; reprimands to sinners, backsliders, and divisive disputants; and everywhere tender exhortations.

Be filled with thanksgiving. Let the presence of Christ dwell in you, a well-spring of abounding wisdom; teach and encourage one another with hymns and songs of the spiritual life; make music in your hearts in gratitude to God.⁴⁴

Here are great phrases that all Christendom quotes and cherishes: “the letter kills, the spirit gives life”;⁴⁵ “evil communications corrupt good manners”;⁴⁶ “to the pure all things are pure”;⁴⁷ “the love of money is the root of all evil.”⁴⁸ Here are frank confessions of his faults, even of his statesmanlike hypocrisies:

I have made myself everyone’s slave, so as to win over all the more. To the Jews I have become like a Jew to win Jews ... to those without the Law I have become like a man without any law ... I have become all things to all men, that I might save some of them. I do it all for the sake of the Good News, that I may share its blessings with the rest.⁴⁹

These epistles were preserved, and often publicly read, by the congregations to which they were addressed. By the end of the first century many of them were widely known; Clement of Rome refers to them in 97, Ignatius and Polycarp soon afterwards; gradually they entered into the subtlest theology of the Church. Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse, and his transforming vision of Christ; influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denunciations of matter and the body as evil; recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a “scapegoat” for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.^{* 50} Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Hellas had long since believed in gods—Osiris, Attis, Dionysus—who had died to redeem mankind; such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities; and the word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeeming Dionysus.⁵² The gentiles of Antioch and other Greek cities, never having known Jesus in the flesh, could only accept him after the manner of their savior gods. “Behold,” said Paul, “I show you a mystery.”⁵³

Paul added to this popular and consoling theology certain mystic conceptions already made current by the Book of Wisdom and the philosophy of Philo. Christ, said Paul, is “the wisdom of God,”⁵⁴ the first-born Son of God; “he is before all things, in him all things exist . . . through him all things have been created.”⁵⁵ He is not the Jewish Messiah who will deliver Israel from bondage; he is the Logos whose death will deliver all men. Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known, and could stand on an equality with the immediate apostles, who were no match for him in metaphysical speculation; he could give to the life of Christ, and to the life of man, high roles in a magnificent drama that embraced all souls and all eternity. Moreover, he could answer the troublesome questions of those who asked why Christ, if very god, had allowed himself to be put to death: Christ had died to redeem a world lost to Satan by Adam’s sin; he had to die to break the bonds of death and open the gates of heaven to all who should be touched by the grace of God.

Two factors, said Paul, determine who shall be saved by Christ’s death: divine election and humble faith. God chooses from all eternity those whom he will bless with his grace, and those whom he will damn.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Paul bestirred himself to awaken faith as a rod to catch God’s grace; only through such “assurance of things longed for,” such “confidence in things unseen,”⁵⁷ can the soul experience that profound change which makes a new man, unites the believer with Christ, and allows him to share in the fruits of Christ’s death. Good works and the performance of all the 613 precepts of the Jewish Law will not suffice, said Paul; they cannot remake the inner man, or wash the soul of sin. The death of Christ had ended the epoch of the Law; now there should no more be Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for “in union with Christ Jesus you are all one.”⁵⁸ As to good works combined with faith, Paul never tired of inculcating them; and the most famous words ever spoken about love are his own:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of preaching, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I can move mountains; if I have not love I am nothing. And though I give away everything that I am, and give myself, but do it in pride, not love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious or boastful. ... It does not insist on its rights. ... It never fails. So faith, hope and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love.⁵⁹

To sexual love, and marriage, Paul gives the most discouraging toleration. One passage ⁶⁰ suggests, but does not prove, that he was married: “Have we not” (he and Barnabas) “a right to take a Christian wife about with us, like the rest of the apostles, and the Lord’s brothers, and Peter?”—but in another ⁶¹ he calls himself single. Like Jesus, he had no sympathy for physical desire.⁶² He was horrified when he heard of promiscuity and perversions.⁶³ “Do you not know,” he asked the Corinthians, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you? . . . Honor God with your bodies.”⁶⁴ Virginity is better than marriage, but marriage is better than concupiscence. The marriage of divorced persons is forbidden, except after mixed unions. Women are to be obedient to their husbands, slaves to their masters. “Everyone ought to remain in the station in which he was called” (i.e., converted to Christianity). “If you were a slave when you were called, never mind. Even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of your present condition instead. For a slave who has been called to union with the Lord is a freedman of the Lord, just as a freeman who had been called is a slave of Christ.”⁶⁵ Freedom and slavery meant little if the world was soon coming to an end. By the same token national liberty was unimportant. Let “every soul be in subjection to the higher powers, for there is no power but God, and the powers that be are ordained by God.”⁶⁶ It was ungracious of Rome to destroy so accommodating a philosopher.

4. The Martyr

“Do your best to come to me soon,” runs the doubtful second letter to Timothy,

for Demas has deserted me for love of the present world . . . Crescens has gone, and Titus; no one but Luke is with me. ... At my first appearance in court no one came to help me; everybody deserted me. . . . But the Lord stood by me, and gave me strength, so that I might make a full presentation of the message and let all the heathen hear it. So I was saved from the jaws of the lion. . . . My life is already being poured out, and the time has come for my departure. I have had a part in the great contest. I have run my race, I have preserved the faith.^66a

He spoke bravely, but he was desolate. One ancient tradition said that he was freed, went to Asia and Spain, preached again, and once more found himself a prisoner in Rome; probably he was never freed. Without wife or children to comfort him, with all friends gone but one, only his faith could support him; and perhaps that too was shaken. Like the other Christians of his age, he had lived on the hope of seeing Christ return. He had written to the Philippians: “We are eagerly awaiting the coming of a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . The Lord is coming soon.”⁶⁷ And to the Corinthians: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . and those who buy anything as if they did not own it. . . . For the present shape of the world is passing away . . . Maranatha! Lord, come quickly!”⁶⁸ But in his second epistle to the Thessalonians he reproved them for neglecting the affairs of this world in expectation of Christ’s early advent; the coming will be delayed until the “Adversary”—Satan—“makes his appearance and proclaims himself to be God.”⁶⁹ We surmise from his last letters that he had struggled, during his imprisonment, to reconcile his early faith with the long delay in the Parousia or Second Appearance. More and more he put his hope beyond the grave, and made for his own solace the great adjustment that saved Christianity—the transformation of the belief in Christ’s earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death. Apparently he was tried again, and convicted; Caesar and Christ came face to face, and Caesar won for a day. We do not know the precise charge; probably now, as at Thessalonica, Paul was accused of “disobeying the emperor’s decrees, and claiming that someone else called Jesus is king.”⁷⁰ This was a crime of maiestas, punishable with death. We have no ancient record of the trial; but Tertullian, writing about 200, reports that Paul was beheaded at Rome; and Origen, about 220, writes that “Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero.”⁷¹ Probably, as a Roman citizen, he had the honor of a distinct execution, and was not mingled with the Christians crucified after the fire of 64. Tradition united him with Peter in a simultaneous, though separate, martyrdom; and a touching legend pictured the great rivals meeting in friendship on the road to death. Over the place on the Via Ostia, where the Church believed that Paul had found peace, a shrine was raised in the third century. Remade in ever fairer form, it stands today as the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura—St. Paul beyond the Walls.

It is a fit symbol of his victory. The emperor who condemned him died a coward’s death, and soon nothing survived of his inordinate works. But from the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity, as from Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church. Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, confined in Judaic Law; he had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world. With the patience of a statesman he had interwoven the ethics of the Jews with the metaphysics of the Greeks, and had transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into the Christ of theology. He had created a new mystery, a new form of the resurrection drama, which would absorb and survive all the rest. He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue, and in that sense had begun the Middle Ages. It was a tragic change, but perhaps humanity had willed it so; only a few saints could achieve the imitation of Christ, but many souls could rise to faith and courage in the hope of eternal life.

The influence of Paul was not immediately felt. The communities that he had established were tiny isles in a pagan sea. The church at Rome was Peter’s, and remained faithful to his memory. For a century after Paul’s death he was almost forgotten. But when the first generations of Christianity had passed away, and the oral tradition of the apostles began to fade, and a hundred heresies disordered the Christian mind, the epistles of Paul provided the framework for a stabilizing system of belief that united the scattered congregations into a powerful Church.

Even so, the man who had detached Christianity from Judaism was still so essentially Jewish in intensity of character and sternness of morality that the Middle Ages, adopting paganism into a colorful Catholicism, saw no kindred spirit in him, built few churches to him, seldom sculptured his figure or used his name. Fifteen centuries went by before Luther made Paul the Apostle of the Reformation, and Calvin found in him the somber texts of the predestinarian creed. Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

III. JOHN

The accidents of history have transmitted Paul to us in comparative clarity, and have left the apostle John in obscurity and mystery. Besides three epistles, two major works have come down to us under his name. Criticism tentatively assigns the Book of Revelation to the year 69-70,⁷² and to another John, “the Presbyter” mentioned by Papias (135).⁷³ Justin Martyr (135) attributes this powerful Apocalypse to the “beloved” apostle;⁷⁴ but as early as the fourth century Eusebius⁷⁵ noted that some scholars doubted its authenticity. The author must have been a man of considerable prominence, for he addresses the churches of Asia in a tone of menacing authority. If the apostle wrote it (and we may provisionally continue to think so), we can understand why, like his brother James, he was called Boanerges, Son of Thunder. In Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Sardis, and other cities of Asia Minor, John, rather than Peter or Paul, was looked upon as the highest head of the Church. Tradition as reported by Eusebius⁷⁶ held that John had been banished to Patmos by Domitian, and had on that Aegean isle written both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse. He lived to so great an age that people said he would never die.

In form Revelation resembles the books of Daniel and Enoch. Such prophetic-symbolic visions were a literary device frequently used by the Jews of the age; there were several other apocalypses (“hidden things revealed”), but this one surpassed all the rest in lurid eloquence. Starting from the common belief that the coming of the Kingdom of God would be preceded by the reign of Satan and the heyday of evil, the author describes the principate of Nero as precisely this Satanic age. Satan and his followers, having revolted against God, are defeated by Michael’s angelic hosts, are cast down upon the earth, and there lead the pagan world in the attack upon Christianity. Nero is the Beast and Antichrist of the book, a Messiah from Satan as Jesus was from God. Rome is described as “the harlot who sits on the great waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication”; she is the “whore of Babylon,” the source and center and summit of all iniquity, immorality, perversion, idolatry; there the blasphemous and bloodstained Caesars demand the worship that Christians must reserve for Christ.

In a succession of visions the author sees the punishments that will fall upon Rome and its empire. A plague of locusts will for five months torture all inhabitants except the 144,000 Jews who have on their foreheads the sign of Christianity.⁷⁷ Other angels will empty “the seven vials of God’s wrath” upon the earth, afflicting men with terrible sores, and turning the sea “into blood like a dead man’s,” so that “every living thing in the sea” will die. Another angel will let loose the full heat of the sun upon all unrepentant men; another will cover the earth with darkness; four angels will lead “twice 10,000 times 10,000” knights to slaughter a third of mankind. Four horsemen will ride forth to “kill the people with sword, famine, death, and the wild animals of the earth.”⁷⁸ A great earthquake will tumble the planet into ruins; huge hailstones will fall upon the surviving infidels, and Rome will be utterly destroyed. The kings of the earth will come together on the plains of Armageddon to make their last stand against God; but they will be overwhelmed in death. Satan and his cohorts, everywhere defeated, will be plunged into Hell. Only true Christians will be saved from these calamities; and those who have suffered for Christ’s sake, who have been “washed in the blood of the Lamb,”⁷⁹ will receive abounding reward.

After a thousand years Satan will be released to prey again upon mankind; sin will mount again in an unbelieving world; and the forces of evil will make a last effort to undo the work of God. But they will once more be overcome, and this time Satan and his followers will be cast into Hell forever. Then will come the Last Judgment, when all the dead will be raised from their graves, and the drowned will be drawn up out of the seas. On that dread day all “whose names are not found in the Book of Life” will be “flung into ... a burning lake of fire and brimstone.”⁸⁰ The faithful will “gather for God’s great banquet, and will eat the bodies of kings, commanders, mighty men . . . the bodies of all men, slaves or freemen, high or low,”⁸¹ who have not heeded the call of Christ. A new heaven and earth will be formed, and a New Jerusalem will come down from the hand of God to be a paradise on earth. It will have a foundation of precious stones, buildings of translucent silver or gold, walls of jasper, and each gate a single pearl; through it will run a “river of living water,” on whose bank will grow the “tree of life.” The reign of evil will be ended for all time; the faithful of Christ will inherit the earth; “there will be no death any longer, nor night, nor any grief or pain.”⁸²

The influence of the Book of Revelation was immediate, enduring, and profound. Its prophecies of salvation for loyal believers, and of punishment for their enemies, became the sustenance of a persecuted Church. Its theory of the millennium solaced those who mourned the long delay in the second coming of Christ. Its vivid images and brilliant phrases entered into both the popular and the literary speech of Christendom. For nineteen centuries men have interpreted the events of history as fulfillments of its visions; and in some recesses of the white man’s world it still gives its dark colors and bitter flavor to the creed of Christ.

It seems incredible that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel should have come from the same hand. The Apocalypse is Jewish poetry, the Fourth Gospel is Greek philosophy. Perhaps the apostle wrote Revelation in justifiable wrath after Nero’s persecution, and the Gospel in the mellow metaphysics of his old age (A.D. 90?). His memories of the Master may by this time have faded a bit, so far as one could ever forget Jesus; and doubtless in the isles and cities of Ionia he had heard many an echo of Greek mysticism and philosophy. Plato had set a theme by picturing the Ideas of God as the patterns on which all things were formed; the Stoics had combined these Ideas into the Logos Spermatikos or fertilizing wisdom of God; the Neo-Pythagoreans had made the Ideas a divine person; and Philo had turned them into the Logos or Reason of God, a second divine principle, through which God created, and communicated with, the world. If we reread the famous exordium of the Fourth Gospel with all this in mind, and retain the Logos of the Greek original in place of the translation Word, we perceive at once that John has joined the philosophers:

In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . All things were made by the Logos; without him nothing was made that was made. It was by him that all things came into existence. ... So the Logos became flesh and blood, and dwelt amongst us.

Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being,⁸³ and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul’s work of detaching Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law; he was made to address the Jews as “you,” and to speak of their Law as “yours”; he was not a Messiah sent “to save the lost sheep of Israel,” he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the background, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy; and the god Christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic mind. Now the pagan world—even the anti-Semitic world—could accept him as its own.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there, too, Christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the “ages of the world,” the “final conflagration,” the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the “Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”⁸⁴ The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.⁸⁵ Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Growth of the Church

A.D. 96-305

I. THE CHRISTIANS

THEY met in private rooms or small chapels, and organized themselves on the model of the synagogue.¹ Each congregation was called an ekklesia—the Greek term for the popular assembly in municipal governments. Slaves were welcomed, as in the Isiac and Mithraic cults; no attempt was made to liberate them, but they were comforted by the promise of a Kingdom in which all could be free. The early converts were predominantly proletarian, with a sprinkling of the lower middle classes and an occasional conquest among the rich. Nevertheless, they were far from being the “dregs of the people,” as Celsus would claim; they lived for the most part orderly and industrious lives, financed missions, and raised funds for impoverished Christian communities. Little effort was made as yet to win over the rural population; these came in last, and it was in this strange way that their name pagani (villagers, peasants) came to be applied to the pre-Christian inhabitants of the Mediterranean states.

Women were admitted to the congregations, and rose to some prominence in minor roles; but the Church required them to shame the heathen by lives of modest submission and retirement. They were bidden to come to worship veiled, for their hair was considered especially seductive, and even angels might be distracted by it during the service;² Saint Jerome thought it should be entirely cut off.³ Christian women were also to avoid cosmetics and jewelry, and particularly false hair; for the blessing of the priest, falling upon dead hair from another head, would hardly know which head to bless.⁴ Paul had instructed his communities sternly:

Women should keep quiet in church. They must take a subordinate place. If they want to find out anything they should ask their husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church. ... A man ought not to wear anything on his head in church, for he is the image of God and reflects God’s glory, while woman is a reflection of man’s glory. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man. That is why she ought to wear upon her head something to symbolize her subjection.⁵

This was the Judaic and Greek view of woman, not the Roman; perhaps it represented a reaction against the license into which some women had debased their growing liberty. We may believe, from these very fulminations, that despite the lack of jewels and scents, and with the help of veils, Christian women succeeded in being attractive, and exercised their ancient powers in their subtle ways. For unmarried or widowed women the Church found many useful tasks. They were organized as “sisters,” performed works of administration or charity, and created in time the divers orders of those nuns whose cheerful kindliness is the noblest embodiment of Christianity.

Lucian, about 160, described “those imbeciles,” the Christians, as “disdaining things terrestrial, and holding these as belonging to all in common.”⁶ A generation later Tertullian declared that “we” (Christians) “have all things in common except our wives,” and added, with his characteristic bite: “at that point we dissolve our partnership, precisely where the rest of men make it effective.”⁷ We should not take these statements literally; as another passage in Tertullian⁸ suggests, this communism meant merely that each Christian would contribute according to his means to the congregation’s common fund. The expectation of an early end to the existing order of things doubtless facilitated giving; the richer members may have been persuaded that they must not let the Last Judgment surprise them in the arms of Mammon. Some early Christians agreed with the Essenes that the prosperous man who does not share his surplus is a thief.⁹ James, “brother of the Lord,” attacked wealth with words of revolutionary bitterness:

Come, now, you rich people, weep aloud and howl over the miseries that shall overtake you! Your wealth has rotted, your clothes are moth-eaten, your gold and silver are rusted . . . and their rust will eat into your very flesh, for you have stored up fire for the last days. The wages you have withheld from the laborers who have reaped your harvests cry aloud, and their cries have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. . . . Has not God chosen the world’s poor to possess the Kingdom?¹⁰

In that Kingdom, he adds, the rich will wither like flowers under a scorching sun.¹¹

An element of communism entered into the custom of the common meal. As the Greek and Roman associations had met on occasion to dine together, so the early Christians gathered frequently in the agapé or love feast, usually on a Sabbath evening. The dinner began and ended with prayer and scriptural readings, and the bread and wine were blessed by the priest. The faithful appear to have believed that the bread and wine were, or represented, the body and blood of Christ;¹² the worshipers of Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras had entertained like beliefs at the banquets where they ate the magic embodiments or symbols of their gods.¹³ The final ritual of the agapé was the “kiss of love.” In some congregations this was given only by men to men, and by women to women; in others this hard restriction was not enforced. Many participants discovered an untheological delight in the pleasant ceremony; and Tertullian and others denounced it as having led to sexual indulgences.¹⁴ The Church recommended that the lips should not be opened in kissing, and that the kiss should not be repeated if it gave pleasure.¹⁵ In the third century the agapé gradually disappeared.

Despite such episodes, and the diatribes of preachers calling their congregations to perfection, we may accept the old belief that the morals of the early Christians were a reproving example to the pagan world. After the weakening of the ancient faiths had removed their frail support from the moral life, and the attempt of Stoicism at an almost natural ethic had failed with all but the best of men, a new supernatural ethic accomplished, at whatever cost to the free and dissolvent intellect, the task of regulating the jungle instincts of man into a viable morality. The hope of the coming Kingdom carried with it belief in a Judge who saw every act, knew man’s every thought, and could not be eluded or deceived. To this divine surveillance was added mutual scrutiny: in these little groups sin could with difficulty find a hiding place; and the community publicly reprimanded those members who had violated the new moral code with insufficient secrecy. Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents of murder;¹⁶ in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.¹⁷ The Church forbade with less success the attendance of Christians at the theater or the public games, and their participation in the festivities of pagan holidays.¹⁸ In general, Christianity continued and exaggerated the moral sternness of the embattled Jews. Celibacy and virginity were recommended as ideal; marriage was tolerated only as a check on promiscuity and as a ridiculous means of continuing the race, but husband and wife were encouraged to refrain from sexual relations.¹⁹ Divorce was allowed only when a pagan wished to annul a marriage with a convert. The remarriage of widows or widowers was discountenanced, and homosexual practices were condemned with an earnestness rare in antiquity. “So far as sex is concerned,” said Tertullian, “the Christian is content with the woman.”²⁰

Much of this difficult code was predicated on the early return of Christ. As that hope faded, the voice of the flesh rose again, and Christian morals were relaxed; an anonymous pamphlet. The Shepherd of Hermas (ca. 110), inveighed against the reappearance, among Christians, of avarice, dishonesty, rouge, dyed hair, painted eyelids, drunkenness, and adultery.²¹ Nevertheless, the general picture of Christian morals in this period is one of piety, mutual loyalty, marital fidelity, and a quiet happiness in the possession of a confident faith. The younger Pliny was compelled to report to Trajan that the Christians led peaceful and exemplary lives.²² Galen described them as “so far advanced in self-discipline and . . . intense desire to attain moral excellence that they are in no way inferior to true philosophers.”²³ The sense of sin took on a new intensity with the belief that all mankind had been tainted by Adam’s fall, and that soon the world would end in a judgment of eternal punishment or reward. Many Christians were absorbed in the effort to come clean to that dread assize; they saw a lure of Satan in every pleasure of the senses, denounced the “world and the flesh,” and sought to subdue desire with fasts and varied chastisements. They looked with suspicion upon music, white bread, foreign wines, warm baths, or shaving the beard—which seemed to flout the evident will of God.²⁴ Even for the ordinary Christian, life took on a more somber tint than paganism had ever given it except in the occasional “apotropaic” appeasement of subterranean deities. The serious temper of the Jewish Sabbath was transferred to the Christian Sunday that replaced it in the second century.

On that dies Domini, or Lord’s Day, the Christians assembled for their weekly ritual. Their clergy read from the Scriptures, led them in prayer, and preached sermons of doctrinal instruction, moral exhortation, and sectarian controversy. In the early days members of the congregation, especially women, were allowed to “prophesy”—i.e., to “speak forth,” in trance or ecstasy, words to which meaning could be given only by pious interpretation. When these performances conduced to ritual fever and theological chaos, the Church discouraged and finally suppressed them. At every step the clergy found itself obliged not to generate superstition, but to control it.

By the close of the second century these weekly ceremonies had taken the form of the Christian Mass. Based partly on the Judaic Temple service, partly on Greek mystery rituals of purification, vicarious sacrifice, and participation, through communion, in the death-overcoming powers of the deity, the Mass grew slowly into a rich congeries of prayers, psalms, readings, sermon, antiphonal recitations, and, above all, that symbolic atoning sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” which replaced, in Christianity, the bloody offerings of older faiths. The bread and wine which these cults had considered as gifts placed upon the altar before the god were now conceived as changed by the priestly act of consecration into the body and blood of Christ, and were presented to God as a repetition of the self-immolation of Jesus on the cross. Then, in an intense and moving ceremony, the worshipers partook of the very life and substance of their Saviour. It was a conception long sanctified by time; the pagan mind needed no schooling to receive it; by embodying it in the “mystery of the Mass,” Christianity became the last and greatest of the mystery religions. It was a custom lowly in origin²⁵ and beautiful in development; its adoption was part of the profound wisdom with which the Church adjusted itself to the symbols of the age and the needs of her people; no other ceremony could have so heartened the essentially solitary soul, or so strengthened it to face a hostile world.^*

The eucharist, or “blessing” of the bread and wine, was one of the seven Christian “sacraments”—sacred rituals believed to convey divine grace. Here, too, the Church used the poetry of symbols to console and dignify the life of man, to renew at each step in the human odyssey the fortifying touch of deity. In the first century we find only three ceremonies conceived of as sacraments—baptism, communion, and holy orders; but already, in the customs of the congregations, the germs of the rest were present. It was apparently the practice of the early Christians to add to baptism an “imposition of hands,” whereby the apostle or priest introduced the Holy Spirit into the believer;²⁸ in the course of time this action was separated from baptism and became the sacrament of confirmation.²⁹ As the baptism of adults was gradually replaced by the baptism of infants, men felt the need of some later spiritual cleansing; public acknowledgment of sin passed into private confession to the priest, who claimed to have received from the apostles or their episcopal successors the right to “bind and loose”—to impose penances and pardon sins.³⁰ The sacrament of penance was an institution capable of abuse through the ease of forgiveness; but it gave the sinner strength to reform, and spared anxious souls the neuroses of remorse. In these centuries marriage was still a civil ceremony; but by adding and requiring her sanction the Church lifted it from the level of a passing contract to the sanctity of an inviolable vow. By the year 200 the laying on of hands took the added form of “holy orders,” by which the bishops assumed the exclusive right to ordain priests capable of administering the sacraments validly. Finally the Church derived from the Epistle of James (v, 14) the sacrament of “extreme unction,” or last blessing, by which the priest anointed the sense organs and extremities of a dying Christian, cleansed him again of sin, and prepared him to meet his God. It would be the shallowest folly to judge these ceremonies in terms of their literal claims; in terms of human encouragement and inspiration they were the wisest medicaments of the soul.

Christian burial was the culminating honor of the Christian life. Since the new faith proclaimed the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul, every care was taken of the dead; a priest officiated at the interment, and each corpse received an individual tomb. About the year 100 the Christians of Rome, following Syrian and Etruscan traditions, began to bury their dead in catacombs—probably not for concealment but for the economy of space and expense. Workmen dug long subterranean passages at various levels, and the dead were laid in superimposed crypts along the sides of these galleries. Pagans and Jews practiced the same method, perhaps as a convenience for burial societies. Some of the passages seem purposely devious, and suggest their use as hiding places in persecutions. After the triumph of Christianity the custom of catacomb burial died out; the crypts became objects of veneration and pilgrimage; by the ninth century they had been blocked up and forgotten, and only accident discovered them in 1578.

What remains of early Christian art is for the most part preserved in the frescoes and reliefs of the catacombs. Here, about 180, appear the symbols that were to be so prominent in Christianity: the dove, representing the soul freed from the prison of this life; the phoenix, rising out of the ashes of death; the palm branch, announcing victory; the olive branch, offering peace; and the fish, chosen because the Greek word for it, i-ch-th-u-s, formed the initials of the phrase lesous Christos theou uios soter—“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.” Here also is the famous theme of the Good Shepherd, frankly modeled on a Tanagra statue of Mercury carrying a goat. Occasionally these designs catch a certain Pompeian grace, as in the flowers, vines, and birds that decorated the ceiling of St. Domitilla’s tomb; usually they are the undistinguished work of minor craftsmen corrupting with Oriental obscurity the clearness of classic line. Christianity was in these centuries so absorbed in the other world that it had little interest in adorning this one. It continued the Judaic aversion to statuary, confused imagery with idolatry, and condemned sculpture and painting as too often glorying in the nude; consequently, as Christianity grew, plastic art declined. Mosaic was more popular; the walls and floors of basilicas and baptistries were inlaid with tesselated foliage and flowers, the Paschal Lamb, and pictures from the Testaments. Similar scenes were carved in rough relief on sarcophagi. Meanwhile architects were adapting the Greco-Roman basilica to the needs of Christian worship. The small temples that had housed the pagan gods could offer no models for churches designed to enclose whole congregations; the spacious nave and aisles of the basilica lent themselves to this purpose, and its apse seemed naturally destined to become the sanctuary. In these new shrines Christian music inherited diffidently the Greek notation, modes, and scales. Many theologians frowned upon the singing of women in church, or, indeed, in any public place; for a woman’s voice might arouse some profane interest in the ever excitable male.³¹ Nevertheless, the congregations often expressed in hymns their hope, thanksgiving, and joy; and music began to be one of the fairest adornments and subtlest servants of the Christian faith.

All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.

So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness. Nearly every convert, with the ardor of a revolutionary, made himself an office of propaganda. The roads, rivers, and coasts, the trade routes and facilities, of the Empire largely determined the lines of the Church’s growth: eastward from Jerusalem to Damascus, Edessa, Dura, Seleucia, and Ctesiphon; southward through Bostra and Petra into Arabia; westward through Syria into Egypt; northward through Antioch into Asia Minor and Armenia; across the Aegean from Ephesus and Troas to Corinth and Thessalonica; over the Egnatian Way to Dyrrhachium; across the Adriatic to Brundisium, or through Scylla and Charybdis to Puteoli and Rome; through Sicily and Egypt to north Africa; over the Mediterranean or the Alps to Spain and Gaul, and thence to Britain: slowly the cross followed the fasces, and the Roman eagles made straight the way for Christ. Asia Minor was in these centuries the stronghold of Christianity; by 300 the majority of the population in Ephesus and Smyrna were Christians.³² The new faith fared well in north Africa: Carthage and Hippo became leading centers of Christian learning and dispute; here rose the great Fathers of the Latin Church—Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine; here the Latin text of the Mass, and the first Latin translation of the New Testament, took form. In Rome the Christian community numbered some 100,000 by the end of the third century; it was able to send financial aid to other congregations; long since it had claimed for its bishop the supreme authority in the Church. Altogether we may count a fourth of the population in the East as Christian by 300, and a twentieth in the West. “Men proclaim,” said Tertullian (ca. 200), “that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world.”³³

II. THE CONFLICT OF CREEDS

It would have been surprising if, in the multitude of relatively independent centers of Christianity, subject to different traditions and environments, there had failed to develop a diversity of customs and creeds. Greek Christianity in particular was destined to a flood of heresies by the metaphysical and argumentative habits of the Greek mind. Christianity can be understood only in the perspective of these heresies, for even in defeating them it took something of their color and form.

One faith united the scattered congregations: that Christ was the son of God, that he would return to establish his Kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in him would at the Last Judgment be rewarded with eternal bliss. But Christians differed as to the date of the second advent. When Nero died and Titus demolished the Temple, and again when Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem, many Christians hailed these calamities as signs of the second coming. When chaos threatened the Empire at the close of the second century, Tertullian and others thought that the end of the world was at hand;³⁴ a Syrian bishop led his flock into the desert to meet Christ halfway, and a bishop in Pontus disorganized the life of his community by announcing that Christ would return within a year.³⁵ As all signs failed, and Christ did not come, wiser Christians sought to soften the disappointment by reinterpreting the date of his return. He would come in a thousand years, said an epistle ascribed to Barnabas;³⁶ he would come, said the most cautious, when the “generation” or race of the Jews was quite extinct, or when the Gospel had been preached to all gentiles; or, said the Gospel of John, he would send in his stead the Holy Spirit or Paraclete. Finally the Kingdom was transferred from earth to heaven, from the years of our life to a paradise beyond the grave. Even the belief in the millennium—in the return of Jesus after a thousand years—was discouraged by the Church, and was ultimately condemned. The faith in the second advent had established Christianity; the hope of heaven preserved it.^*

Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history—which is to illuminate the present through the past—were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing Church, and which the Church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies. Gnosticism—the quest of godlike knowledge (gnosis) through mystic means—was not a heresy so much as a rival; it antedated Christianity, and had proclaimed theories of a Soter, or Savior, before Christ was born.³⁷ That same Simon Magus of Samaria, whom Peter rebuked for “simony,” was probably the author of a Great Exposition which gathered together a maze of Oriental notions about the complicated steps that could lead the human mind to a divine comprehension of all things. In Alexandria the Orphic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Neoplatonist traditions, fusing with the Logos philosophy of Philo, stirred Basilides (117), Valentinus (160), and others to form weird systems of divine emanations and personified “aeons” of the world. In Edessa Bardesanes (200) created literary Syriac by describing these aeons in prose and verse. In Gaul the Gnostic Marcus offered to reveal to women the secrets of their guardian angels; his revelations were flattering, and he accepted their persons as his reward.³⁸

The greatest of the early heretics was not quite a Gnostic, but was influenced by their mythology. About 140 Marcion, a rich youth of Sinope, came to Rome vowing to complete Paul’s work of divorcing Christianity from Judaism. The Christ of the Gospels, said Marcion, had described as his father a God of tenderness, forgiveness, and love; but the Yahveh of the Old Testament was a harsh god of unrelenting justice, tyranny, and war; this Yahveh could not be the father of the gentle Christ. What good god, asked Marcion, would have condemned all mankind to misery for eating an apple, or desiring knowledge, or loving woman? Yahveh exists, and is the creator of the world; but he made the flesh and bones of man from matter, and therefore left man’s soul imprisoned in an evil frame. To release the soul of man a greater god sent his son to earth; Christ appeared, already thirty years of age, in a phantasmal, unreal body, and by his death won for good men the privilege of a purely spiritual resurrection. The good, said Marcion, are those who, following Paul, renounce Yahveh and the Jewish Law, reject the Hebrew Scriptures, shun marriage and all sensual enjoyment, and overcome the flesh by a stern asceticism. To propagate these ideas Marcion issued a New Testament composed of Luke’s Gospel and the letters of Paul. The Church excommunicated him, and returned to him the substantial sum that he had presented to it on coming to Rome.

While the Gnostic and Marcionite sects were spreading rapidly in both East and West, a new heresiarch appeared in Mysia. About 156 Montanus denounced the increasing worldliness of Christians and the growing autocracy of bishops in the Church; he demanded a return to primitive Christian simplicity and austerity, and a restored right of prophecy, or inspired speech, to the members of the congregations. Two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, took him at his word and fell into religious trances; and their utterances became the living oracles of the sect. Montanus himself prophesied with such eloquent ecstasy that his Phrygian followers—with the same religious enthusiasm that had once begotten Dionysus—hailed him as the Paraclete promised by Christ. He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the predestined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated. As in early Christian days, marriage and parentage were neglected, goods were communistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ.³⁹ When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Christianity in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accommodate them all; some he executed; but most of them he dismissed with the words: “Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes and precipices?”⁴⁰ The Church banned Montanism as a heresy, and in the sixth century Justinian ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive.⁴¹

Of minor heresies there was no end. The Encratites abstained from meat, wine. and sex; the Abstinents practiced self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin; the Docetists taught that Christ’s body was merely a phantom, not human flesh; the Theodotians considered him only a man; the Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosata thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection; the Modalists, Sabellians, and Monarchians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monophysites only one nature, the Monothelites only one will. The Church overcame them by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better understanding of the ways and needs of men.

In the third century a new danger rose in the East. At the coronation of Shapur I (242) a young Persian mystic, Mani of Ctesiphon, proclaimed himself a Messiah sent upon earth by the True God to reform the religious and moral life of mankind. Borrowing from Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, and Gnosticism, Mani divided the world into rival realms of Darkness and Light; the earth belonged to the kingdom of Darkness, and Satan had created man. Nevertheless, the angels of the God of Light had surreptitiously introduced some elements of light into humanity—mind, intelligence, reason. Even woman, said Mani, has in her some sparks of light; but woman is Satan’s masterpiece, his chief agent in tempting man to sin. If a man will refrain from sex, idolatry, and sorcery, and lead an ascetic life of vegetarianism and fasting, the elements of light in him can overcome his Satanic impulses, and lead him, like a kindly light, to salvation. After thirty years of successful preaching Mani was crucified at the suggestion of the Magian clergy, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from one of Susa’s gates. Martyrdoms enflamed the faith to wild enthusiasm; Manicheism spread into western Asia and north Africa, won Augustine for ten years, survived the persecutions of Diocletian and the conquests of Islam, and maintained a declining life for a thousand years till the coming of Genghis Khan.

The old religions still claimed a majority of the Empire’s population. Judaism gathered its impoverished exiles into scattered synagogues, and poured its piety into its Talmuds. The Syrians continued to worship their Baals under Hellenistic names, and the Egyptian priests tended faithfully their zoological pantheon. Cybele, Isis, and Mithras retained their addicts till the close of the fourth century; under Aurelian a modified Mithraism captured the Roman state. Votive offerings to the classical divinities still came to the temples, initiates and candidates journeyed to Eleusis, and throughout the Empire aspiring citizens performed the motions of the imperial cult. But life had gone out of the classic creeds. They no longer aroused, except here and there, the warm devotion that makes a religion live. It was not that the Greeks and the Romans abandoned these faiths, once so lovely or austere; they abandoned rather the will to live, and by excessive family limitation, or physiological exhaustion, or devastating wars, so reduced their own number that the temples lost their cultivators step by step with the farms.

About the year 178, while Aurelius fought the Marcomanni on the Danube, paganism made a lusty attempt to defend itself against Christianity. We know of it only through Origen’s book Against Celsus, and the quotations recklessly made there from Celsus’ True Word. This second Celsus in our story was a gentleman of the world rather than a speculative philosopher; he felt that the civilization which he enjoyed was bound up with the old Roman faith; and he resolved to defend that faith by attacking the Christianity that was now its most challenging enemy. He made so intimate a study of the new religion that the learned Origen was astounded by his erudition. Celsus assailed the credibility of the Scriptures, the character of Yahveh, the importance of Christ’s miracles, the incompatibility of Christ’s death with his omnipotent divinity. He ridiculed the Christian belief in a final conflagration, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the body:

It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will remain—not merely the living ones, but those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really, it is the hope of worms! ... It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless—slaves and women and children—whom Christians can persuade—wool-dressers, and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and common men, whoever is a sinner ... or a godforsaken fool.⁴²

Celsus was alarmed by the spread of Christianity, by its scornful hostility to paganism, military service, and the state; how was the Empire to protect itself from the barbarians prowling on every frontier if its inhabitants succumbed to so pacifistic a philosophy? A good citizen, he thought, should conform to the religion of his country and his time without public criticism of its absurdities; these did not much matter; what counted was a unifying faith supporting moral character and civic loyalty. Then, forgetting the insults he had heaped upon them, he appealed to the Christians to come back to the old gods, to worship the guardian genius of the emperor, and to join in the defense of the imperiled state. No one paid much attention to him; pagan literature does not mention him; he would have been quite forgotten had not Origen undertaken to refute him. Constantine was wiser than Celsus, and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.

III. PLOTINUS

Moreover, Celsus was out of step with his time; he asked men to behave like gentlemen skeptics when they were withdrawing from a society that enslaved so many of them into a mystic world that made every man a god. That consciousness of supersensible powers which is the foundation of religion was prevailing universally over the materialism and determinism of a prouder age. Philosophy was abandoning the interpretation of that sense experience which is the realm of science, and was devoting itself to a study of the unseen world. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists developed Pythagoras’ theory of transmigration, and Plato’s contemplation of the Divine Ideas, into an asceticism that sought to sharpen spiritual perception by starving the physical senses, and to reclimb by self-purification the steps by which the soul had been degraded from heaven into man.

Plotinus was the culmination of this mystic theosophy. Born at Lycopolis in 203, he was a Coptic Egyptian with a Roman name and a Greek education. In his twenty-eighth year he discovered philosophy, passed unsatisfied from teacher to teacher, and found at last, in Alexandria, the man he sought. Ammonius Saccas, a Christian converted to paganism, was attempting to reconcile Christianity and Platonism, as his pupil Origen would do. After studying under Ammonius for ten years, Plotinus joined a Persia-bound army in the hope of learning the wisdom of the Magi and the Brahmans at first hand. He reached Mesopotamia, turned back to Antioch, went to Rome (244), and remained there till his death. His school of philosophy became so fashionable that the Emperor Gallienus made him a court favorite, and agreed to help him establish in Campania an ideal Platonopolis, to be governed on the principles of the Republic. Gallienus later withdrew his consent, perhaps to spare Plotinus an ignominious failure.

Plotinus restored the repute of philosophy by living like a saint amid the luxuries of Rome. He had no care for his body; indeed, says Porphyry, “he was ashamed that his soul had a body.”⁴³ He refused to sit for his portrait, on the ground that his body was the least important part of him—a hint to art to seek the soul. He ate no meat and little bread, was simple in his habits, kindly in his ways. He avoided all sexual relations, but did not condemn them. His modesty befitted a man who saw the part in the perspective of the whole. When Origen attended his class, Plotinus blushed and wished to end his lecture, saying, “The zest dies down when the speaker feels that his hearers have nothing to learn from him.”⁴⁴ He was not an eloquent speaker, but his devotion to his subject, and his absorbed sincerity, were good substitutes for oratory. Reluctantly, and only late in life, he put his doctrines into writing. He never revised his first draft, and despite Porphyry’s editing, the Enneads remain among the most disorderly and difficult works in the history of philosophy.^*

Plotinus was an idealist who graciously recognized the existence of matter. But matter by itself, he argued, is only the formless possibility of form. Every form that matter takes is given it by its inward energy or soul (psyche). Nature is the total of energy or soul, producing the totality of forms in the world. The lower reality does not produce the higher; the higher being, soul, produces the lower—embodied form. The growth of the individual man from his beginnings in the womb, through the slow formation of organ after organ to full maturity is the work of the psyche or vital principle within him; the body is gradually molded by the longings and directives of the soul. Everything has soul—an inward energy creating outward form. Matter is evil only insofar as it has not received mature form; it is an arrested development; and evil is the possibility of good.

We know matter only through idea—through sensation, perception, thought; what we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas; at most it is an elusive hypothetical something pressing against our nerve ends (Mill’s “permanent possibility of sensation”). Ideas are not material; the notion of extension in space is obviously inapplicable to them. The capacity to have and use ideas is reason (nous); this is the peak of the human triad of body, soul, and mind. Reason is determined insofar as it depends upon sensation; it is free insofar as it is the highest form of the creative, molding soul.

The body is both the organ and the prison of the soul. The soul knows that it is a higher kind of reality than the body; it feels its kinship with some vaster soul, some cosmic creative life and power; and in the perfection of thought it aspires to join again that supreme spiritual reality from which it appears to have fallen in some primeval catastrophe and disgrace. Plotinus here surrenders discursively to the Gnosticism that he professes to reject, and describes the descent of the soul through various levels from heaven to corporeal man; generally he prefers the Hindu notion that the soul transmigrates from lower to higher, or from higher to lower, forms of life according to its virtues and vices in each incarnation. Sometimes he is playfully Pythagorean: those who have loved music too much will become songbirds in their next avatar, and overspeculative philosophers will be transformed into eagles.⁴⁶ The more developed the soul is the more persistently it seeks its divine source, like a child strayed from its parent, or a wanderer longing for home. If it is capable of virtue, or true love, or devotion to the Muses, or patient philosophy, it will find the ladder down which it came, and will climb it to its God. Let the soul, then, purify itself, let it desire the unseen essence passionately, let it lose the world in meditation; suddenly, perhaps in some moment when all the noise of the senses is stilled, and matter ceases to pound on the gates of mind, the soul will feel itself absorbed in the ocean of being, the spiritual and final reality. (“Sometimes,” wrote Thoreau, idly drifting on Walden Pond, “I ceased to live, and began to be.”) “When this takes place,” says Plotinus,

The soul will see divinity as far as it is lawful. . . . And she will see herself illuminated, full of intellectual light; or, rather, she will perceive herself to be a pure light, unburdened, agile, and becoming god.⁴⁷

But what is God? “He” too is a triad—of unity (hen), reason (nous), and soul (psyche). “Beyond Being there is the One”: ⁴⁸ through the seeming chaos of mundane multiplicity runs a unifying life. We know almost nothing of it except its existence; any positive adjective or prejudiced pronoun applied to it would be an unwarrantable limitation; we may only call it One and First, and Good as the object of our supreme desire. Emanating from this Unity is the World Reason, corresponding to Plato’s Ideas, the formative models and ruling laws of things; they are, so to speak, the thoughts of God, the Reason in the One, the order and rationality of the world. Since these Ideas persist while matter is a kaleidoscope of passing shapes, they are the only true or enduring reality. But Unity and Reason, though they hold the universe together, do not create it; this function is performed by the third aspect of the godhead—the vitalizing principle that fills all things and gives them their power and predestined form. Everything, from atoms to planets, has an activating soul, which is itself a part of the World-Soul; every Atman is Brahman. The individual soul is eternal only as vitality or energy, not as a distinct character.⁴⁹ Immortality is not the survival of personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.⁵⁰

Virtue is the movement of the soul toward God. Beauty is not mere harmony and proportion, as Plato and Aristotle thought, but the living soul or unseen divinity in things; it is the predominance of soul over body, of form over matter, of reason over things; and art is the translation of this rational or spiritual beauty into another medium. The soul can be trained to rise from the pursuit of beauty in material or human forms to seeking it in the hidden soul in Nature and her laws, in science and the subtle order that it reveals, finally in the divine Unity that gathers all things, even striving and conflicting things, into a sublime and marvelous harmony.⁵¹ In the end beauty and virtue are one—the unity and co-operation of the part with the whole.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful, yet act as does the creator of a statue ... he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked . . . and never cease chiseling your statue until . . . you see the perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine.⁵²

We feel in this philosophy the same spiritual atmosphere as in contemporary Christianity—the withdrawal of tender minds from civic interest to religion, a flight from the state to God. It was no accident that Plotinus and Origen were fellow pupils and friends, and that Clement developed a Christian Platonism at Alexandria. Plotinus is the last of the great pagan philosophers; and like Epictetus and Aurelius, he is a Christian without Christ. Christianity accepted nearly every line of him, and many a page of Augustine echoes the ecstasy of the supreme mystic. Through Philo, John, Plotinus, and Augustine, Plato conquered Aristotle, and entered into the profoundest theology of the Church. The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.

IV. THE DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH

The Church now won to its support some of the finest minds in the Empire. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, began the powerful dynasty of the post-apostolic “Fathers,” who gave a philosophy to Christianity, and overwhelmed its enemies with argument. Condemned to be thrown to the beasts for refusing to abjure his faith (108), Justin composed on his way to Rome several letters whose hot devotion reveals the spirit in which Christians could go to their death:

I give injunctions to all men that I am dying willingly for God’s sake, if you do not hinder it. I beseech you, be not an unseasonable kindness to me. Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. . . . Rather entice the wild beasts that they may become my tomb, and leave no trace of my body, that when I fall asleep I be not burdensome to any. ... I long for the beasts that are prepared for me. . . . Let there come upon me fire and cross [crucifixion], struggles with wild beasts, cutting and tearing asunder, rackings of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, and cruel tortures of the devil, if so I may attain to Jesus Christ! ⁵³

Quadratus, Athenagoras, and many others wrote “Apologies” for Christianity, usually addressed to the emperor. Minucius Felix, in an almost Ciceronian dialogue, allowed his Caecilius to defend paganism ably, but made his Octavius answer him so courteously that Caecilius was almost persuaded to be a Christian. Justin of Samaria, coming to Rome in the reign of Antoninus, opened there a school of Christian philosophy, and, in two eloquent “Apologies,” sought to convince the Emperor, and “Verissimus the Philosopher,” that Christians were loyal citizens, paid their taxes promptly, and might, under friendly treatment, become a valuable support to the state. For some years he taught unmolested; but the sharpness of his tongue made him enemies, and in 166 a rival philosopher prodded the authorities to arrest him and six of his followers, and put them all to death. Twenty years later Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, struck a powerful blow for the unity of the Church in his Adversus Haereses, a blast at all heretics. The only way of preventing Christianity from disintegrating into a thousand sects, said Irenaeus, was for all Christians to accept humbly one doctrinal authority—the decrees of the episcopal councils of the Church.

The doughtiest fighter for Christianity in this period was Quintus Septimius Tertullianus of Carthage. Born there about 160, the son of a Roman centurion, he studied rhetoric in the same school that trained Apuleius; then for years he practiced law at Rome. Midway in life he was converted to Christianity, married a Christian, renounced all pagan pleasures, and (says Jerome) was ordained a priest. All the arts and tricks that he had learned from rhetoric and law were now put at the service of Christian apologetics, enhanced by a convert’s ardor. Greek Christianity was theological, metaphysical, mystical; Tertullian made Latin Christianity ethical, juristic, practical. He had the vigor and virulence of Cicero, the satirical scurrility of Juvenal, and sometimes he could rival Tacitus in concentrating acid in a phrase. Irenaeus had written in Greek; with Minucius and Tertullian Christian literature in the West became Latin, and Latin literature became Christian.

In the year 197, while Roman magistrates in Carthage were trying Christians on charges of disloyalty, Tertullian addressed to an imaginary court the most eloquent of his works—the Apologeticus. He assured the Romans that Christians “are always praying for all emperors, for . . . a safe dynasty, brave armies, a faithful Senate, and a quiet world.”⁵⁴ He extolled the grandeur of monotheism, and found premonitions of it in pre-Christian writers. O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae! he cried in a happy phrase—“Behold the witness of the soul, by its very nature Christian!”⁵⁵ A year later, passing with strange celerity from persuasive defense to ferocious attack, he issued De Spectaculis, a scornful description of the Roman theaters as citadels of obscenity, and of the amphitheaters as the acme of man’s inhumanity to man. And he concluded with a bitter threat:

Other spectacles will come—that last eternal Day of Judgment . . . when all this old world and its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle will be on that day! How I shall marvel, laugh, rejoice, and exult, seeing so many kings—supposedly received into heaven—groaning in the depths of darkness!—and the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus melting in fiercer flames than they ever kindled . . . against the Christians!—sages and philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together! . . . and tragic actors now more than ever vocal in their own tragedy, and players lither of limb by far in the fire, and charioteers burning red on the wheel of flame! ⁵⁶

Such unhealthy intensity of imagination does not make for orthodoxy. As Tertullian aged, the same energy that in his youth had courted pleasure now turned into a fierce denunciation of every consolation but those of faith and hope. He addressed woman in the coarsest terms as “the gate by which the demon enters,” and told her that “it is on your account that Jesus Christ died.”⁵⁷ Once he loved philosophy, and had written works like De Anima, applying Stoic metaphysics to Christianity; now he renounced all reasoning independent of revelation, and rejoiced in the incredibility of his creed. “God’s son died: it is believable precisely because it is absurd [ineptum]. He was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impossible.”⁵⁸ Sinking into a morose puritanism, Tertullian in his fifty-eighth year rejected the orthodox Church as too sullied with worldly ways, and embraced Montanism as a more outright application of the teachings of Christ. He condemned all Christians who became soldiers, artists, or state officials; all parents who did not veil their daughters; all bishops who restored repentant sinners to communion; finally he called the pope pastor moechorum—“shepherd of adulterers.”⁵⁹

Despite him the Church prospered in Africa. Able and devoted bishops like Cyprian made the diocese of Carthage almost as rich and influential as Rome’s. In Egypt the growth of the Church was slower, and its early stages are lost to history; suddenly, late in the second century, we hear of a “Catechetical School” in Alexandria, which wedded Christianity to Greek philosophy, and produced two major fathers of the Church. Both Clement and Origen were well versed in pagan literature, and loved it after their own fashion; if their spirit had prevailed there would have been a less destructive break between classical culture and Christianity.

When Origenes Adamantius was seventeen (202) his father was arrested as a Christian, and condemned to death. The boy wished to join him in prison and martyrdom; his mother, failing to deter him by other means, hid all his clothes. Origen sent his father letters of encouragement: “Take heed,” he bade him, “not to change your mind on our account.”⁶⁰ The father was beheaded, and the youth was left to care for the mother and six young children. Inspired to greater piety by the many martyrdoms he saw, he adopted the ascetic life. He fasted much, slept little and on bare ground, wore no shoes, and subjected himself to cold and nakedness; finally, in rigorous interpretation of Matthew XIX, 12, he emasculated himself.^* In 203 he succeeded Clement as head of the Catechetical School. Though he was only eighteen, his learning and eloquence drew many students, pagan as well as Christian, and his fame spread throughout the Christian world.

Some ancients reckoned his “books” at 6000; many, of course, were brief brochures; even so Jerome asked, “Which of us can read all that he has written?”⁶² In love with the Bible, which through boyhood memorizing had become part of his mind, Origen spent twenty years, and employed a corps of stenographers and copyists, collating in parallel columns the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, a Greek transliteration of that text, and Greek translations of it by the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.^* By comparing these diverse renderings, and using his knowledge of Hebrew, Origen offered to the Church a corrected Septuagint. Insatiate, he added commentaries, sometimes of great length, on every book in the Bible. In Peri archon, “First Principles,” he achieved the first orderly and philosophical exposition of Christian doctrine. In a “Miscellany” (Stromateis) he undertook to demonstrate all Christian dogmas from the writings of the pagan philosophers. To lighten his task he availed himself of that allegorical method by which pagan philosophers had made Homer accord with reason, and Philo had reconciled Judaism with Greek philosophy. The literal meaning of Scripture, argued Origen, overlay two deeper layers of meaning—the moral and the spiritual—to which only the esoteric and educated few could penetrate. He questioned the truth of Genesis as literally understood: he explained away as symbols the unpleasant aspects of Yahveh’s dealings with Israel; and he dismissed as legends such stories as that of Satan taking Jesus up to a high mountain and offering him the kingdoms of the world.⁶³ Sometimes, he suggested, scriptural narratives were invented in order to convey some spiritual truth.⁶⁴ “What man of sense,” he asked,

will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun or moon or 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 ... so that one who tasted of the fruit obtained life? ⁶⁵

As Origen proceeds it becomes apparent that he is a Stoic, a Neo-Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a Gnostic, who is nonetheless resolved to be a Christian. It would have been too much to ask of a man that he should abandon the faith for which he had edited a thousand volumes and flung away his manhood. Like Plotinus he had studied under Ammonius Saccas, and sometimes it is hard to distinguish his philosophy from theirs. God, in Origen, is not Yahveh, he is the First Principle of all things. Christ is not the human figure described in the New Testament, he is the Logos or Reason who organizes the world; as such he was created by God the Father, and is subordinate to him.⁶⁶ In Origen, as in Plotinus, the soul passes through a succession of stages and embodiments before entering the body; and after death it will pass through a like succession before arriving at God. Even the purest souls will suffer for a while in Purgatory; but in the end all souls will be saved. After the “final conflagration” there will be another world with its long history, and then another, and another. . . . Each will improve on the preceding, and the whole vast sequence will slowly work out the design of God.⁶⁷

We cannot wonder that Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, looked with some doubt upon the brilliant philosopher who adorned his diocese and corresponded with emperors. He refused to ordain Origen to the priesthood, on the ground that emasculation disqualified him. But while Origen was traveling in the Near East two Palestinian bishops ordained him. Demetrius protested that this infringed his rights; he convened a synod of his clergy; it annulled Origen’s ordination, and banished him from Alexandria. Origen removed to Caesarea, and continued his work as a teacher. There he wrote his famous defense of Christianity Contra Celsum (248). With magnanimous spirit he admitted the force of Celsus’ arguments; but he replied that for every difficulty and improbability in Christian doctrine there were worse incredibilities in paganism. He concluded not that both were absurd, but that the Christian faith offered a nobler way of life than could possibly come from a dying and idolatrous creed.

In 250 the Decian persecution reached Caesarea. Origen, now sixty-five, was arrested, stretched on the rack, loaded with chains and an iron collar, and kept in prison for many days. But death caught up with Decius first, and Origen was released. He lived only three years more; torture had fatally injured a body already weakened by unremitting asceticism. He died as poor as when he had begun to teach, and the most famous Christian of his time. As his heresies ceased to be the secret of a few scholars, the Church found it necessary to disown him; Pope Anastasius condemned his “blasphemous opinions” in 400, and in 553 the Council of Constantinople pronounced him anathema. Nevertheless, nearly every later Christian savant for centuries learned from him, and depended upon his work; and his defense of Christianity impressed pagan thinkers as no “apology” had done before him. With him Christianity ceased to be only a comforting faith; it became a full-fledged philosophy, buttressed with Scripture but proudly resting on reason.

V. THE ORGANIZATION OF AUTHORITY

The Church might be excused for condemning Origen: his principle of allegorical interpretation not only made it possible to prove anything, but at one blow it did away with the narratives of Scripture and the earthly life of Christ; and it restored individual judgment precisely while proposing to defend the faith. Faced with the hostility of a powerful government, the Church felt the need of unity; it could not safely allow itself to be divided into a hundred feeble parts by every wind of intellect, by disloyal heretics, ecstatic prophets, or brilliant sons. Celsus himself had sarcastically observed that Christians were “split up into ever so many factions, each individual desiring to have his own party.”⁶⁸ About 187 Irenaeus listed twenty varieties of Christianity; about 384 Epiphanius counted eighty. At every point foreign ideas were creeping into Christian belief, and Christian believers were deserting to novel sects. The Church felt that its experimental youth was ending, its maturity was near; it must now define its terms and proclaim the conditions of its membership. Three difficult steps were necessary: the formation of a scriptural canon, the determination of doctrine, and the organization of authority.

The literature of Christianity in the second century abounded in gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and “acts.” Christians differed widely in accepting or rejecting these as authoritative expressions of the Christian creed. The Western churches accepted the Book of Revelation, the Eastern churches generally rejected it; these accepted the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Epistles of James, the Western churches discarded them. Clement of Alexandria quotes as sacred scripture a late first-century treatise, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Marcion’s publication of a New Testament forced the hand of the Church. We do not know when the books of our present New Testament were determined as canonical—i.e., as authentic and inspired; we can only say that a Latin fragment discovered by Muratori in 1740, named after him, and generally assigned to ca. 180, assumes that the canon had by that time been fixed.

Ecclesiastical councils or synods met with increasing frequency in the second century. In the third they were limited to bishops; and by the close of that century they were recognized as the final arbiters of “Catholic”—i.e., universal—Christian belief. Orthodoxy survived heresy because it satisfied the need for a definite creed that could moderate dispute and quiet doubt, and because it was supported by the power of the Church.

The problem of organization lay in determining the center of that power. After the weakening of the mother church at Jerusalem, the individual congregations, unless established or protected by other communities, appear to have exercised an independent authority. The church of Rome, however, claimed to have been founded by Peter, and quoted Jesus as saying: “Thou art Peter” (Heb. Cephas, Gk. Petros), “and upon this rock” (Heb. Cephas, Gk. petra) “I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”⁶⁹ The passage has been challenged as an interpolation, and as a pun to which only Shakespeare would stoop; but the likelihood remains that Peter, if he did not establish the Christian colony in Rome, preached to it, and appointed its bishop.⁷⁰ Irenaeus (187) wrote that Peter “committed to the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate”; Tertullian (200) confirmed this tradition; and Cyprian (252), bishop of Rome’s great rival, Carthage, urged all Christians to accept the primacy of the Roman see.⁷¹

The earliest occupants of “Peter’s throne” left no mark upon history. The third, Pope ^* Clement, stands out as the author of an extant letter written about 96 to the church of Corinth, appealing to its members to maintain harmony and order;⁷² here, only a generation after Peter’s death, the bishop of Rome speaks with authority to the Christians of a distant congregation. The other bishops, while acknowledging the “primacy” Of the Roman bishop as the lineal successor of Peter, repeatedly challenged his power to overrule their own decisions. The Eastern churches celebrated Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, whatever day of the week this might be; the Western churches postponed the feast to the following Sunday. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, visiting Rome about 156, tried and failed to persuade Anicetus, Bishop of Rome, to have the Eastern date observed in the West; and on his return he rejected the Pope’s suggestion that the Eastern churches should accept the Western date. Pope Victor (190) rephrased Anicetus’ request as a command; the bishops of Palestine obeyed, those of Asia Minor refused. Victor sent out letters to the Christian congregations, excommunicating the recalcitrant churches; many bishops, even in the West, protested against so severe a measure, and apparently Victor did not insist.

His successor Zephyrinus (202-18) was “a simple and unlettered man.”⁷³ To aid him in administering the spreading episcopate of Rome, Zephyrinus raised to the archdeaconate a man whose intelligence was less questioned than his morals. Callistus, said his enemies, had begun his career as a slave, had become a banker, had embezzled the funds deposited with him, had been sentenced to hard labor, had been released, had started a riot in a synagogue, had been condemned to the mines of Sardinia, had escaped by having his name surreptitiously inserted into a list of pardoned prisoners, and had then lived for ten years at Antium in painful peace. When Zephyrinus placed him in charge of the papal cemetery he transferred it to the Via Appia, in the catacomb that bears his name. When Zephyrinus died, and Callistus was chosen pope, Hippolytus and some other priests denounced him as unfit, and set up a rival church and papacy (218). Doctrinal differences accentuated the schism: Callistus believed in readmitting to the Church those who, after baptism, had committed a mortal sin (adultery, murder, apostasy), and who professed their penitence. Hippolytus considered such lenience ruinous, and wrote a Refutation of All Heresies, with special attention to this one. Callistus excommunicated him, gave the Church a competent administration, and vigorously asserted the supreme authority of the Roman see over all Christendom.

The schism of Hippolytus ended in 235; but under Pope Cornelius (251-53) his heresy was revived by two priests—Novatus at Carthage and Novatian at Rome—who set up schismatic churches dedicated to the unrelenting exclusion of postbaptismal sinners. The Council of Carthage under Cyprian, and the Council of Rome under Cornelius, excommunicated both groups. Cyprian’s appeal for Cornelius’ support strengthened the papacy; but when Pope Stephen I (254-57) ruled that converts from heretical sects need not be rebaptized, Cyprian led a synod of African bishops in rejecting the decree. Stephen, like another Cato, excommunicated them in an ecclesiastical Punic War; his providentially early death allowed the quarrel to lapse, and averted the secession of the powerful African Church.

Despite overreachings and setbacks, the Roman see increased its power with almost every decade. Its wealth and ecumenical charities exalted its prestige; it was consulted by the Christian world on every issue of gravity; it took the initiative in repudiating and combating heresies, and in defining the canon of the Scriptures. It was deficient in scholars, and could not boast a Tertullian, an Origen, or a Cyprian; it gave its attention to organization rather than to theory; it built and governed and let others write and talk. Cyprian rebelled; but it was he who, in his De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, acclaimed the see or seat of Peter (cathedra Petri) as the center and summit of Christendom, and proclaimed to the world those principles of solidarity, unanimity, and persistency which have been the essence and mainstay of the Catholic Church.⁷⁴ By the middle of the third century the position and resources of the papacy were so strong that Decius vowed he would rather have a rival emperor at Rome than a pope.⁷⁵ The capital of the Empire naturally became the capital of the Church.

As Judea had given Christianity ethics, and Greece had given it theology, so now Rome gave it organization; all these, with a dozen absorbed and rival faiths, entered into the Christian synthesis. It was not merely that the Church took over some religious customs and forms common in pre-Christian Rome—the stole and other vestments of pagan priests, the use of incense and holy water in purifications, the burning of candles and an everlasting light before the altar, the worship of the saints, the architecture of the basilica, the law of Rome as a basis for canon law, the title of Pontifex Maximus for the Supreme Pontiff, and, in the fourth century, the Latin language as the noble and enduring vehicle of Catholic ritual. The Roman gift was above all a vast framework of government, which, as secular authority failed, became the structure of ecclesiastical rule. Soon the bishops, rather than the Roman prefects, would be the source of order and the seat of power in the cities; the metropolitans, or archbishops, would support, if not supplant, the provincial governors; and the synod of bishops would succeed the provincial assembly. The Roman Church followed in the footsteps of the Roman state; it conquered the provinces, beautified the capital, and established discipline and unity from frontier to frontier. Rome died in giving birth to the Church; the Church matured by inheriting and accepting the responsibilities of Rome.

CHAPTER XXIX

The Collapse of the Empire

A.D. 193-305

I. A SEMITIC DYNASTY

ON January 1, 193, a few hours after the assassination of Commodus, the Senate met in a transport of happiness, and chose as emperor one of its most respected members, whose just administration as prefect of the city had continued the finest traditions of the Antonines. Pertinax accepted with reluctance a dignity so exalted that any fall from it must be fatal. He “demeaned himself as an ordinary man,” says Herodian,¹ attended the lectures of the philosophers, encouraged literature, replenished the treasury, reduced taxes, and auctioned off the gold and silver, the embroideries and silks and beautiful slaves, wherewith Commodus had filled the imperial palace; “in fact, he did everything,” says Dio Cassius, “that a good emperor should do.”² The freedmen who had lost their perquisites through his economy conspired with the Praetorian Guard, which disliked his restoration of discipline. On March 28, 300 soldiers forced their way into the palace, struck him down, and carried his head upon a spear to their camp. The people and the Senate mourned and hid.

The leaders of the Guard announced that they would bestow the crown upon that Roman who should offer them the largest donative. Didius Julianus was persuaded by his wife and daughter to interrupt his meal and enter his bid. Proceeding to the camp, he found a rival offering 5000 drachmas ($3000) to each soldier in return for the throne. The agents of the Guard passed from one millionaire to the other, encouraging higher bids; when Julianus promised each man 6250 drachmas the Guard declared him emperor.

Aroused by this crowning indignity, the people of Rome appealed to the legions in Britain, Syria, and Pannonia to come and depose Julianus. The legions, angered by exclusion from the donative, hailed their respective generals with the imperial title, and marched toward Rome. The Pannonian commander, Lucius Septimius Severus Geta, gained the Principate by boldness, expedition, and bribery. He pledged himself to give each soldier 12,000 drachmas upon his accession; he led them from the Danube to within seventy miles of Rome in a month; he won over to himself the troops sent to halt him, and subdued the Praetorians by offering them pardon in return for the surrender of their leaders. He violated precedent by entering the capital with all his troops in full armor, but he himself appeased tradition by wearing civilian dress. A tribune found Julianus in tears and terror in the palace, led him into a bathroom, and beheaded him (June 2, 193).

Africa, which was at this time providing Christianity with its ablest defenders, gave birth (146) and early schooling to Septimius. Brought up in a family of Punic-speaking Phoenicians, he studied literature and philosophy in Athens and practiced law in Rome. Despite the Semitic accent of his Latin, he was among the best-educated Romans of his time, and liked to surround himself with poets and philosophers. But he did not allow philosophy to impede his wars, or poetry to soften his character. He was a man of handsome features, strong physique, and simple dress, hardy in hardship, clever in strategy, fearless in battle, ruthless in victory. He conversed with wit, judged with penetration, lied without scruple, loved money more than honor, and governed with cruelty and competence.³

The Senate had made the mistake of declaring for his rival Albinus; Septimius, surrounded with 600 guards, persuaded it to confirm his own accession; then he put scores of senators to death, and confiscated so many aristocratic estates that he became landlord to half the peninsula. The decimated Senate was replenished by imperial nomination with new members chiefly from the monarchical East. The great lawyers of the age—Papinian, Paulus, Ulpian—accumulated arguments in defense of absolute power. Septimius ignored the Senate except when he sent it commands; he assumed full control of the various treasuries, based his rule frankly upon the army, and made the Principate an hereditary military monarchy. The army was increased in size; the pay of the soldiers was raised, and became an exhausting drain upon the public purse. Military service was made compulsory, but was forbidden to the inhabitants of Italy; henceforth provincial legions would choose emperors for a Rome that had lost the fortitude to rule.

This realistic warrior believed in astrology, and excelled in the interpretation of portents and dreams. When, six years before his accession, his first wife died, he offered his hand to a rich Syrian whose horoscope had pledged her a throne. Julia Domna was the daughter of a rich priest of the god Elagabal at Emesa. There, long since, a meteorite had fallen, had been enshrined in a gaudy temple, and was worshiped as the symbol, if not the embodiment, of the deity. Julia came, bore Septimius two sons, Caracalla and Geta, and rose to her promised throne. She was too beautiful to be monogamous, but Septimius was too busy to be jealous. She gathered around her a salon of literary men, patronized the arts, and persuaded Philostratus to write and adorn the life of Apollonius of Tyana. Her strong character and influence accelerated that orientation of the monarchy toward Eastern ways which culminated morally under Elagabalus, and politically under Diocletian.

Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after a four years’ siege, thereby lowering a barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). “I have been everything,” he said, “and it is worth nothing.”⁴ Caracalla, says Herodian, “was much vexed that his father’s decease was so lingering . . . and solicited the physicians to dispatch the old man by any means that might come to hand.”⁵ Septimius had blamed Aurelius for yielding the Empire to Commodus; now he bequeathed it to Caracalla and Geta, with cynical advice: “Make your soldiers rich, and do not bother about anything else.”⁶ He was the last emperor, for eighty years, who died in bed.

Caracalla,^* like Commodus, seemed made to prove that a man’s quota of energy seldom allows him to be great in both his life and his seed. Attractive and obedient in boyhood, he became in manhood a barbarian infatuated with hunting and war. He captured wild boars, fought a lion singlehanded, kept lions always near him in his palace, and had one as occasional table companion and bedfellow.⁷ He particularly enjoyed the company of gladiators and soldiers, and would keep senators cooling their heels in his antechambers while he prepared food and drink for his companions. Unwilling to share the imperial power with his brother, he had Geta assassinated in 212; the youth was slaughtered in his mother’s arms, and covered her garments with his blood. We are told that Caracalla condemned to execution 20,000 of Geta’s following, many citizens, and four Vestal Virgins whom he accused of adultery.⁸ When the army murmured at the killing of Geta, he silenced it with a donative equal to all the sums that Septimius had gathered into all the treasuries. He favored the soldiers and the poor against the business classes and the aristocracy; possibly the stories we read about him in Dio Cassius are a senator’s revenge. Anxious to raise more revenue, he doubled the inheritance tax to ten per cent; and noting that the tax applied only to Roman citizens, he extended the Roman franchise to all free male adults in the Empire (212); they achieved citizenship precisely when it brought a maximum of obligations and a minimum of power. He added to the adornment of Rome an arch to Septimius Severus, which still stands, and public baths whose gigantic ruins attest their ancient grandeur. But for the most part he left the civil government to his mother, and absorbed himself in campaigns.

He had made Julia Domna secretary both a libellis and ab epistulis—of petitions and correspondence. She joined or replaced him in greeting high members of the state or foreign dignitaries. Gossip whispered that she controlled him by incestuous means; the wits of Alexandria maddened him by referring to her and him as Jocasta and Oedipus. Partly in revenge against these insults, partly because he feared that Egypt might revolt while he was fighting Parthia, he visited the city and superintended (we are assured) the massacre of all Alexandrians capable of bearing arms.⁹

Nevertheless, the founder of Alexandria was his model and envy. He organized 16,000 troops into what he called “Alexander’s phalanx,” equipped them with ancient Macedonian arms, and dreamed of subduing Parthia as Alexander had conquered Persia. He tried hard to be a good soldier, sharing the food and toil and marches of his army, helping it to dig ditches and build bridges, bearing himself bravely in action, and often challenging the enemy to single combat. But his men were not as eager for the Parthian campaign as he was; they loved spoils more ardently than battle; and at Carrhae, where Crassus had been defeated, they stabbed him to death (217). Macrinus, prefect of the Guard, acclaimed himself emperor, and ordered the reluctant Senate to make Caracalla a god. Julia Domna, banished to Antioch, and bereft, within six years, of empire, husband, and sons, refused food until she died.¹⁰

She had a sister, Julia Maesa, as capable as herself. Returning to Emesa, this second Julia found there two promising grandsons. One, by her daughter Julia Soaemias, was a young priest of Baal; his name was Varius Avitus, and would be Elagabalus—“the creative god.”^* The other, by Maesa’s daughter Julia Mamaea, was a boy of ten called Alexianus, and would be Alexander Severus. Though Varius was the son of Varius Marcellus, Maesa spread the rumor that he was the natural son of Caracalla, and gave him the name Bassianus; the Empire was worth her daughter’s reputation, and Marcellus was dead. The Roman soldiers in Syria were already half won to Syrian cults, and felt a pious respect for the fourteen-year-old priest; moreover, Maesa suggested that if they would make Elagabalus emperor she would distribute a substantial donative among them. The soldiers were convinced, and complied. Maesa’s gold brought over to her cause the army that Macrinus sent against them. When Macrinus himself appeared with a substantial force, the Syrian mercenaries wavered; but Maesa and Soaemias sprang from their chariots, and led the softened army to victory. The men of Syria were women, and the women were men.

In the spring of 219 Elagabalus entered Rome dressed in robes of purple silk embroidered with gold, his cheeks stained with vermilion, his eyes artificially brightened, costly bracelets on his arms, a string of pearls around his neck, a jeweled crown on his pretty head. Beside him his grandmother and his mother rode in state. On his first appearance in the Senate he demanded that his mother should be allowed to sit beside him and attend the deliberations. Soaemias had the sense to withdraw, and contented herself with presiding over that Senaculum, or little Senate, of women, which Hadrian’s Sabina had founded, and which dealt with questions of feminine dress, jewelry, precedence, and etiquette. Grandmother Maesa was left to govern the state.

The young emperor had some elements of charm. He made no reprisals against the supporters of Macrinus. He loved music, sang well, played the pipes, the organ, and the horn. Being too young to rule the Empire, he only asked permission to enjoy it. Pleasure, not Baal, was his god, and he was resolved to worship it in all its genders and forms. He invited every class of the free population to visit his palace; at times he would eat and drink and make merry with them; often he would distribute among them lottery prizes ranging from a furnished home to a handful of flies. He loved to play jokes upon his guests: to seat them on inflated cushions that would suddenly burst; to stupefy them with wine and let them wake up amid harmless leopards, bears, and lions. Lampridius assures us that Elagabalus never spent less than 100,000 sesterces ($10,000)—and sometimes 3,000,000—on a banquet to his friends. He would mix gold pieces with peas, onyx with lentils, pearls with rice, amber with beans; he would present horses, or chariots, or eunuchs, as favors; often he bade each guest take home the silver plate and goblets in which the dinner had been served. As for himself, he would have nothing but the best. The water in his swimming pools was perfumed with essence of roses; the fixtures in his bathrooms were of onyx or gold; his food had to be of costly rarities; his dress was studded with jewelry from crown to shoes; and gossip said that he never wore the same rings twice. When he traveled, 600 chariots were needed to carry his baggage and his bawds. Told by a soothsayer that he would die a violent death, he prepared worthy means of suicide if occasion required: cords of purple silk, swords of gold, poisons enclosed in sapphires or emeralds.¹¹ He was slain in a latrine.

Probably his enemies of the Senatorial class invented or exaggerated some of these tales; certainly the stories of his sexual depravity are beyond belief. In any case he perfumed his lust with piety, and schemed to spread among the Romans some worship of his Syrian Baal. He had himself circumcized, and thought of emasculating himself in honor of his god. He brought from Emesa the conical black stone which he worshiped as the emblem of Elagabal; he raised an ornate temple to house it; the stone, encrusted with gems, was carried to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, while the young emperor walked backward before it in dumb adoration. He was willing to recognize all other religions; he patronized Judaism, and proposed to legalize Christianity. He merely insisted, with admirable loyalty, that his stone was the greatest of gods.¹²

His mother, absorbed in amours, looked with indulgence upon this Priapic farce; but Julia Maesa, failing to control it, resolved to forestall a debacle that would end this remarkable dynasty of Syrian women. She persuaded Elagabalus to adopt his cousin Alexander as successor and Caesar. She and Mamaea trained the boy in the duties of his office, and by every art drew the Senate and the people to look upon him as a desirable alternative to the priestly satyr who had offended Rome not by his extravagance or obscenity, but by his subordination of Jupiter to a Syrian Baal. Soaemias discovered the plot, and stirred up the Praetorians against her sister and nephew; Maesa and Mamaea offered richer arguments; and the Guard slew Elagabalus and his mother, dragged his corpse through the streets and around the Circus, and flung it into the Tiber. The Guard proclaimed, the Senate accepted, Alexander as emperor (222).

Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander, like his predecessor, mounted the throne at the age of fourteen. His mother had given herself with singular consecration to the training of his body, mind, and character. He strengthened his frame with labor and exercise, swam in a cold pool for an hour every day, drank a pint of water before each meal, ate sparingly and of the simplest foods. He grew into a handsome youth, tall and strong, skilled in every sport and in the arts of war. He studied Greek and Latin literature, and only moderated his love for them on the insistence of Mamaea, who quoted to him those verses of Virgil that called upon Romans to yield the graces of culture to others, and form themselves to organize a world state and rule it in peace. He painted and sang “with distinction,” and played the organ and the lyre, but never allowed any but his own household to witness these performances. He dressed and behaved with modest simplicity, “was temperate in the enjoyment of love, and would have nothing to do with catamites.”¹³ He showed high respect for the Senate, treated its members as his equals, entertained them in his palace, and often joined them in their homes. Kindly and affable, he visited the sick without distinction of class, gave ready audience to any citizen of decent repute, quickly forgave opponents, and shed no civilian blood in the fourteen years of his reign.¹⁴ His mother reproved his amiability, saying, “You have made your rule too gentle, and the authority of the Empire less respected”; to which he answered, “Yes, but I have made it more lasting and secure.”¹⁵ He was a man of gold, without the alloy required to withstand the rough usage of this world.

He recognized the absurdity of his cousin’s effort to replace Jove with Elagabal, and he co-operated with his mother in restoring the Roman temples and ritual. But to his philosophic mind it seemed that all religions were diverse prayers to one supreme power; he wished to honor all honest faiths; and in his private chapel, where he worshiped every morning, he had icons of Jupiter, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Christ. He quoted frequently the Judaeo-Christian counsel: “What you do not wish a man to do to you, do not do to him”; he had it engraved on the walls of his palace and on many a public building. He recommended the morals of the Jews and the Christians to the Roman people. The unimpressed wits of Antioch and Alexandria referred to him as “Head of the Synagogue.” His mother favored the Christians, protected Origen, and summoned him to explain to her his flexible theology.

Julia Maesa having died soon after Alexander’s accession, Mamaea, with his tutor Ulpian, determined the policies, and conceived the reforms, of Alexander’s administration. She ruled with wisdom and restraint, caring more for the success of the dynasty than for the pageantry of power; she yielded to the great lawyer and the young emperor the credit for the achievements of his reign. She and Ulpian chose sixteen outstanding senators to serve as an imperial council, without whose approval no major measures were carried out. She could control everything except her love for her son. When he married and showed an affectionate partiality for his wife, Mamaea had her banished, and Alexander, forced to choose, surrendered to his mother. As he grew older he took a more active part in administration. “He would give his attention to public business even before dawn,” says his ancient biographer, “and would continue at it to an advanced hour, never growing weary or irritated, but always cheerful and serene.”¹⁶

His basic policy was to weaken the disruptive dominance of the army by restoring the prestige of the Senate and the aristocracy; rule by birth seemed to him the only actual alternative to rule by money, myth, or the sword. With the co-operation of the Senate he effected a hundred economies in administration, dismissed the supernumeraries in his palace, in governmental offices, and in provincial rule. He sold most of the imperial jewelry, and deposited the proceeds in the treasury. Perhaps with less Senatorial approval he legalized, encouraged, and reorganized the workers’ and tradesmen’s associations, and “allowed them to have advocates chosen from their own numbers.”¹⁷ Assuming a severe censorship over public morals, he ordered the arrest of prostitutes and the deportation of homosexuals. While reducing taxes, he restored the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla, built a public library, a fourteen-mile aqueduct, and new municipal baths, and financed the construction of baths, aqueducts, bridges, and roads throughout the Empire. To force down interest rates that were harassing debtors, he lent public money at four per cent, and advanced funds to the poor, without any interest charge, for the purchase of agricultural land. All the Empire prospered and applauded; the godly Aurelius, it seemed, had returned to earth and to power.

But as the Persians and the Germans had taken advantage of the philosopher king, so now they took advantage of the emperor saint. In 230 Ardashir, founder of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, invaded Mesopotamia and threatened Syria. Alexander sent him a philosophical epistle reproving his violence, and arguing that “everyone ought to rest content with his own domain.”¹⁸ Ardashir judged him a weakling, and replied by demanding all Syria and Asia Minor. Accompanied by his mother, the young emperor took the field, and waged with more courage than subtlety an indecisive campaign. History is obscure as to his victories and defeats; in any case Ardashir withdrew from Mesopotamia, perhaps to meet attacks on his eastern front; and the Roman coins of 233 pictured Alexander crowned by Victory and having the Tigris and Euphrates at his feet.

Meanwhile the Alemanni and the Marcomanni, noting that the Rhine and Danube garrisons had been depleted to reinforce the legions in Syria, broke through the Roman limes and ravaged eastern Gaul. After celebrating his Persian triumph, Alexander, again with Mamaea at his side, rejoined his army, and led it to Mainz. On his mother’s advice he negotiated with the enemy, offering them an annual sum to keep the peace. His troops condemned his weakness, and mutinied; they had never forgiven his economy, his discipline, and his subordination of them to the Senate and a woman’s rule. They acclaimed as emperor C. Julius Maximinus, commander of the Pannonian legions. The soldiers of Maximinus forced their way into Alexander’s tent, and slew him, his mother, and his friends (235).

II. ANARCHY

It was no whim of history that made the army supreme in the third century; internal causes had weakened the state and left it exposed on every front. The cessation of expansion after Trajan, and again after Septimius Severus, was the signal for attack; and as Rome had conquered nations by dividing them, so now the barbarians began to conquer her by uniting in simultaneous assaults. The necessity of defense exalted the power of arms and the prestige of soldiery; generals replaced philosophers on the throne, and the last reign of the aristocracy yielded to the revived rule of force.

Maximinus was a good soldier and no more, the robust son of a Thracian peasant; history assures us that he was eight feet tall, and had a thumb of such circumference that he could wear his wife’s bracelet on it as a ring. He had no education, scorned it, and envied it. In his three years as emperor he never visited Rome, but preferred the life of his camp on the Danube or the Rhine. To support his campaigns and appease his troops, he laid such taxes upon the well to do that an upper-class revolt soon formed against his rule. Gordianus, the wealthy and learned proconsul of Africa, accepted the nomination of his army as a rival emperor; being eighty years old, he associated his son with him in the lethal office; they failed to withstand the forces sent against them by Maximinus; the son was killed in battle, the father killed himself. Maximinus revenged himself by proscriptions and confiscations that almost destroyed the aristocracy. “Every day,” says Herodian, “one could see the richest men of yesterday turned beggars today.”¹⁹ The Senate, which had been reconstituted and reinvigorated by Severus, fought back valiantly; it declared Maximinus an outlaw, and chose two of its members, Maximus and Balbinus, as emperors. Maximus led an improvised army to meet Maximinus, who came down across the Alps and besieged Aquileia. Maximinus was the better general, and had the superior forces; the fate of the Senate and the propertied classes seemed sealed; but a group of Maximinus’ soldiers, who had suffered from his savage punishments, killed him in his tent. Maximus returned in triumph to Rome, and was assassinated, along with Balbinus, by the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorians made a third Gordian emperor, and the Senate confirmed the choice.

We shall not repeat in bloody detail the names and battles and deaths of these emperors of anarchy. In the thirty-five years between Alexander Severus and Aurelian, thirty-seven men were proclaimed emperors. Gordian III was slain by his troops while fighting the Persians (244); his successor, Philip the Arab, was defeated and killed at Verona by Decius (249), an Illyrian of wealth and culture whose devotion to Rome well deserved a name so honorable in ancient story. Between campaigns against the Goths he laid out an ambitious program for the restoration of Roman religion, morals, and character, and gave orders for the destruction of Christianity; then he returned to the Danube, met the Goths, saw his son slain beside him, told his wavering army that the loss of any one individual was of little importance, pressed on against the enemy, and was himself struck down in one of the worst defeats in Roman history (251). He was succeeded by Gallus, who was murdered by his troops (253), and then by Aemilianus, who was murdered by his troops (253).

The new emperor, Valerian, already sixty, and facing war at once with the Franks, the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Goths, the Scythians, and the Persians, made his son Gallienus ruler of the Western Empire, kept the East for himself, and led an army into Mesopotamia. He was too old for his tasks, and soon succumbed. Gallienus, now thirty-five, was a man of courage, intelligence, and a culture that seemed almost out of place in this century of barbaric war. He reformed the civilian administration in the West, led his armies to victory against one after another of the Empire’s enemies, and yet found time to enjoy and patronize philosophy and literature, and promote a transient revival of classic art. But even his varied genius was overwhelmed by the accumulating evils of the time.

In 254 the Marcomanni raided Pannonia and north Italy. In 255 the Goths invaded Macedonia and Dalmatia, Scythians and Goths invaded Asia Minor, the Persians invaded Syria. In 257 the Goths captured the fleet of the Bosporan kingdom, ravaged the Greek cities on the Black Sea coasts, burned Trapezus and enslaved its people, and raided Pontus. In 258 they took Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Prusa, Apamea, Nicaea; in the same year the Persians conquered Armenia, and Postumus declared himself the independent ruler of Gaul. In 259 the Alemanni broke into Italy, but were defeated by Gallienus at Milan. In 260 Valerian was overwhelmed by the Persians at Edessa, and died in captivity at a time and place unknown. Shapur I and his clouds of cavalry advanced through Syria to Antioch, surprised the population in the midst of its games, sacked the city, killed thousands, and led more thousands into slavery. Tarsus was taken and devastated, Cilicia and Cappadocia were overrun, and Shapur returned to Persia laden with spoils. Within a decade three ignominious tragedies had overtaken Rome: a Roman emperor had for the first time fallen in defeat, another had been captured by the enemy, and the unity of the Empire had been sacrificed to the necessity of meeting simultaneous attacks on many fronts. Under the force of these blows, and the disorderly elevation and assassination of emperors by troops, the imperial prestige collapsed; those psychological forces which time consecrates into habitual and unquestioned authority lost their hold upon Rome’s enemies, even upon her subjects and citizens. Revolts broke out everywhere: in Sicily and Gaul the oppressed peasantry flared up in wild jacqueries; in Pannonia Ingenuus proclaimed himself sovereign of the eastern provinces. In 263 the Goths sailed down the Ionian coast, sacked Ephesus, and burned down the great Temple of Artemis. All the Hellenistic East was in terror.