The Development of Religious Thought.

[MANICHAEAN]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

Chapter 1.

We had at the time of early Roman society a political life of a highly developed type, which had run through a long course of evolution and which subsequently degenerated. At the same time we also had an established literature based upon that of Ancient Greece and implying a good deal of philosophy and of intellectual freedom. Side by side with all this, there also existed in the Western world, a religious atmosphere in which the grossest and most primitive of savage conceptions and usages thrived in a neighbourhood of a cool and detached scepticism.

Looked back on today it is hard to realize that a people's experience can be so uneven, and that development and retardation can exist at once to so remarkable a degree in the mind of a nation.

Perhaps the explanation is that we judge peoples and ages too much by their literature, and by their literature only after it has survived the test of centuries.

In all immortal literature there is a common note; it deals with the deathless and the vital; and superstition, though long enough and tenacious enough of life, is outlived and outgrown by the power of mans creative instincts. And yet despite this impetus: there is a tendency in certain sections of each generation of men to be less wishful to think and less capable of thought.

Invariably, what might be termed "religion" in the broadest sense begins in magic, with rites and symbols that belong to the crudest of Nature-worship; e.g to agriculture, for instance, and this gradually develops or absorbs higher ideas, till it may reach the unity of the concept of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.

The critical point is reached though where the ultimate question is, will it cut itself clear of its past? Thus we see that the early religions based upon the beliefs of Cybele and Isis that this was never achieved. It sprung up, flourished for a time, and when its course had been run, it withered, leaving a void of unanswered spiritual needs.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 2.

Lets us now move on to some prominent Roman thinkers and outline their contribution to the advancement of religious thinking.

First in line I think would be Vergil.He came before his countrymen, as prophets and poets do in all ages, a child in affairs, but a man in inward experience; he had little or nothing to offer but the impressions left upon his soul by human life. He had the advantage over most prophets in being a master of articulation; and he drew more music from Latin words than had ever been achieved before.

He told men of a new experience of Nature. He had the same "impulses of deeper birth", had seen new gleams and heard new voices. By an inner instinct,based no doubt upon experience, he concluded that love must reach beyond the grave. It was perhaps at odds with previous teaching that one was obliged to argue at the expense of actually living.

The next personage I think would be Seneca. This was an individual who was fundamentally truthful with himself. He never hid his own weakness; he never concealed from himself the difficulty of his ideals; he never tried to delude himself with what he could not believe.

The Stoics had begun long since to make terms with popular religion, but Seneca is entirely free from delusions as to the gods of popular belief. He saw clearly enough that there was no truth in them, and he never sought help from anything but the real. In language curiously suggestive of another school of thought, Seneca speaks of God within us, of divine help given to human effort.Man's part in life is to be the "spectator and interpreter" of "God" as he is the "son of God"; to attach himself to God; to be his soldier, obey his signals, wait his call.

Finally, we have Epictetus whose diminutives of derision, produce the impression of the most lively sense of a personality. He felt that in proportion as men draw near the gods by reason, they cling to purity of soul and body. The terror of contemporary life at this time, with its repulsiveness, its brutality and its fascination, drove men in search of the moral guide. The philosopher's school thus became an infirmary.

The Roman world was so full of glaring vice that every serious man from Augustus onward had insisted on some kind of reformation, and now men were beginning to feel that the reformation must begin within themselves. Thus for example the habit of daily self-examination became general among the Stoics.

Reference further back to the Syrians and Egyptians is probably not idle. The prevalence of Syrian and Egyptian religions, inculcating ecstatic communion with a god and the soul's need of preparation for the next world.

In conclusion, Stoicism had given its converts a new conception of the relation of God and man. One Divine Word was the essence of both. Reason was shared by men and gods, and by pure thought men came into contact with the divine mind. Others sought communion in trance and ritual, but God and men formed a polity, and the Stoic was the fellow-citizen of the gods, obeying, understanding and adoring, as they did, one divine law, one order; a partaker of the divine nature, a citizen of the universe, a free man as no one else was free, because he knew his freedom and knew who shared it with him. He stood on a new footing with the gods, and for him the old cults passed away, superseded by a new worship.

Yet Stoicism in Seneca and Epictetus had reached its zenith. From now onward it declined. Marcus Aurelius, in some ways the most ardent of all Stoics, was virtually the last. The interchangeably of "God," "the gods" and "Zeus" had been used. It was now even a question whether "God" was not an identity with fate, providence, Nature and the Universe.

While for himself the Stoic had the strength of mind to shake off superstition, the common people, and even the weaker brethren of the Stoic school, remained saddled with polytheism and all its terrors and follies.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 3: Jesus of Nazareth.

I think its true to say that the work of Jesus in the matter of spiritual development at this time, was the decisive cleavage with the antiquity that had gone before; and that Jesus shocked his contemporaries with the abrupt nakedness of his religious ideas is not surprising.

Lets look at his early development first.

Joseph the carpenter, who was in essence his serrogate father, gave all his five sons names that stood for something in Hebrew history. On his mothers side, Mary had taught him as a baby to call Joseph “Abba”. The fact that in manhood he gave to God the name that in his childhood he had given to Joseph, surely throws some light upon the home life.

Also if the Kingdom of God was to mean anything, it was his mantra that we must be children again; God's children, to whom their Father is the background of everything. Probably the child's habit of taking nothing for granted, except the love that is all about it, is what Jesus missed most later in grown men.

The Gospels make it clear that of all human sins and weaknesses, none seems to have stirred the anger of Jesus as did self-deception. When the Pharisees in the synagogue watched to see whether Jesus would heal on the Sabbath, he "looked round about upon them all with anger," says Mark. This gaze of Jesus is often mentioned in the Gospels.

Of the grosser classes of sinners he was tolerant, to a point that amazed his contemporaries and gave great occasion of criticism to such enemies as Celsus and Julian. Thus, he had apparently no anger for the woman taken in adultery; and he was the "friend of publicans and sinners", even eating with them.

In fact he had a sense of the real.

The explanation lies partly in Jesus' instinct for reality and truth.

Sensualist and money-lover were at least occupied with a sort of reality; pleasure and money in their way are real, and the pursuit of them brings a man, sooner or later, into contact with realities genuine enough. Whatever illusions publican and harlot might have, the world saw to it that they did not keep them long. The danger for such people was that they might be disillusioned overmuch.

But the Pharisees lied with themselves. If at times a Pharisee traded on his righteousness to over-reach others, his chief victim was himself, as Jesus saw, and as Paul found. Paul, brought up in their school to practise righteousness, gave the whole thing up as a pretence and a lie. But he was an exception. Pharisees in general believed in their own righteousness; and, by tampering with their sense of the proportions of things, they lost all feeling for reality, and with it all consciousness of the value and dignity of man and the very possibility of any conception of God.

Jesus had been bred in another atmosphere, in a school of realities.

When he said "Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of heaven," his words were the record of experience; the paradox was the story of his life. He had known poverty and hand-labour; he had been exposed to feel what those lower down the pecking order feel. Whatever criticism may make of the story of his feeding multitudes, it remains that he was markedly sensitive to the idea of hunger; over and over he urged the feeding of the poor, the maimed and the blind; he suggested the payment of a day's wage for an hour's work, where a day's food was needed and only an hour's work could be had.

No thinker of his day, or for long before and after, was so deeply conscious of the appeal of sheer misery, and this is one of the things on which his followers have never lost the mind of Jesus. Poverty was perhaps even for himself a key to the door into the Kingdom of God. At any rate, he always emphasizes the advantage of disadvantages, for they at least make a man in earnest with himself.

There is a revelation of the seriousness of his whole mind and nature in his reply to the follower who would go away and return. "No man, having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God." It is only the sentimentalism of the church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at home in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus did not.

The same kind of energy is in the parables. The unjust steward was a knave, but he was in earnest; and so was the questionably honest man who found treasure in a field. The merchant let everything go for the one pearl of great price. The parables from nature are true to the facts of nature. Thus, the church laid hold of a characteristic word, when it adopted for all time Jesus' “Amen" / meaning “in truth."

Jesus was always explicit with his followers; they should know from the first that their goal was the cross, and that meantime they would have no place where to lay their heads. They were to begin with hard realities, and to consort with him on the basis of the real.

The world in the age of Jesus was living a good deal upon its past, looking to old books and old cults, as we see in Plutarch and many others. The Jews no less lived upon their great books. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in Jesus. His knowledge of Psalmist and Prophet evoked admiration; but in all his quotations of the Old Testament that have reached us, there is no trace of servitude to the letter and no hint of allegory. He does not quote Scripture as his followers did. Here too he spoke as having authority.

But his own way was to grasp the writer's mind; a very difficult thing in his day, and little done; and to go straight to the root of the matter, regardless of authority and tradition.

Like draws to like, and an intensely real man at once grasped his kinship with other intensely real men; and he found in the prophets, not reeds shaken with the wind, courtiers of king or of people, but men in touch with reality, with their eyes open for God, friends and fore-runners, whose experience illumined his own.

This type of manhood needed no explanation for him. The other sort perplexed him, "Why can you not judge for yourselves?" how was it that men could see and yet not see? From his inner sympathy with the prophetic mind, came his freedom in dealing with the prophets. He read and understood, and decided for himself. No sincere man would ever wish his word to be final for another. Jesus was conscious of his own right to think and to see and to judge, and for him, the final thing was not opinion, nor scripture, nor authority, but reality and experience.

There lay the road to God. Hence it is that Jesus is so tranquil, he does not strive nor cry; for the man who has experienced in himself the power of the real has no doubts about it being able to maintain itself in a world, where at heart men want nothing else.

The Gospels freely reveal what contemporary critics counted weaknesses in Jesus. He weeps, he hungers, he is worn out. He has to be alone; on the mountain by night, in a desert-place before dawn. Such exhaustion is never merely physical or merely spiritual; the two things are one. Men crowded upon Jesus, till he had not leisure to eat; he came into touch with a ceaseless stream of human personalities.

To communicate an idea or to share a feeling is exhausting work, and we read further of deeds of healing, which, Jesus himself said, took "virtue" out of him, and he had to withdraw. When the Syro-Phoenician woman called for his aid, it was a question with him whether he should spend on a foreigner the "virtue" that could with difficulty meet the claims of Israel, for he was not conscious of the "omnipotence" which has been lightly attributed to him. It was the woman's brilliant answer about the little dogs eating the children's crumbs that gained her request. The turn of speech showed a vein of humour, and he consented.

If human experience goes for anything in such a case, contact with a spirit so delicate and sympathetic gave him something of the strength he spent. The incident throws light upon the fluxes and refluxes of feeling within him, and the effect upon him of a spirit with something of his own tenderness and humour.

The church has never forgotten the agony in the garden, but that episode has lost some of its significance because it has not been recognized to be one link in a chain of experience, which we must try to reconstruct.

It has been assumed that Jesus never expected to influence the Pharisees and scribes; but this is to misinterpret the common temper of idealists, and to miss the pain of Jesus' words when he found his hopes of the Pharisees to be vain. Gradually, from their pressure upon his spirit, he grew conscious of the outcome; they would not be content with logomachies; the end might be death.

Few of us have any experience to tell us at what cost to the spirit such a discovery is made.

The common people he read easily enough and recognized their levity. And now, in exile, he began to concentrate himself upon the twelve. It was not till Peter, by a sudden flash of insight, grasped his Messiahship; a character, which Jesus had realized already, though we do not know by what process, and had for reasons of his own concealed; it was not till then that Jesus disclosed his belief that he would be killed at last.

From that moment we may date the falling away of Judas, and what this man's constant presence must have meant to Jesus, ordinary experience may suggest. Shrewd, clever and disappointed, he must have been a chill upon his Master at all hours. His influence upon the rest of the group must have been consciously and increasingly antipathetic. Night by night Jesus could read in the faces which of them had been with Judas during the day. He learnt by what he suffered from the man's tone and look that there would be desertion, perhaps betrayal. The daily suffering involved in trying to recapture the man, in going to seek the lost sheep in the wilderness of bitterness, may be imagined.

Side by side, King, Pharisee and disciple are against him, and the tension, heightened by the uncertainty as to the how, when and where of the issue must have been great. Luke's graphic word says his face was "set" for Jerusalem; it would be, he knew, a focus for the growing forces of hatred.

Day by day the strain increased. Finally Jesus spoke. The where and how of the betrayal he could not determine; the when he could. At the supper, he looked at Judas and then he spoke. "What thou doest, do quickly." The man's face as he hurried out said "Yes" to the unspoken question; and for the moment it brought relief.

This is the background of the garden-scene. What the agony meant spiritually, we can hardly divine. The physical cost is attested by the memory of his face which haunted the disciples. The profuse sweat that goes with acute mental strain is a familiar phenomenon, and its traces were upon him; visible in the torchlight.

Last of all, upon the cross, Nature reclaimed her due from him. Jesus had drawn, as men say, upon the body, and in such cases Nature repays herself from the spirit. The worn-out frame dragged the spirit with it, and he died with the cry—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

No other teacher dreamed that common men could possess a tenth part of the moral grandeur and spiritual power, which Jesus elicited from them, chiefly by believing in them. Here, the sheer originality of Jesus is bewildering. This belief in men Jesus gave to his followers and they never lost it.

The religious in his day looked for God in trance and ritual, in the abnormal and unusual, but for him, as for every man who has ever helped mankind, the ordinary and the commonplace were enough. The Kingdom of God is among you, or even within you.

As for the Pharisees, it is clear that in establishing their own righteousness they laid excessive stress on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping, on tithes, and temple ritual, on the washing of pots and plates, (still rigorously maintained by the modern Jew), and all this was supposed to constitute holiness. Jesus with the clear incisive word of genius dismissed it all as "acting." The Pharisee was essentially an actor; playing to himself little comedies of holiness.

The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of God and he never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and wherewithal they shall be clothed, "your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for bread; will they receive a stone? The picture is one of the strong and tender parent, smiling at the child's anxiety with no notion of his own majesty or of anything but love. So incredibly simple is the relation between God and man; simple, unconstrained, heedless and tender as the talk round a table in Nazareth.

To have the faculty of communicating peace of mind; and it is more often than not done unconsciously, as most great things are, is no light or accidental gift.

That he should taste the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the palliative wine pudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That with open eyes he should set his face for Jerusalem, and with all the sensitiveness of a character, so susceptive of impression and so rich in imagination, he should expose himself to our experience, to the foretaste of death, to the horror of the unknown, and to the supreme fear, the dread of the extinction of personality; and that he should actually undergo all he foresaw, as the last cry upon the cross testified; all this let the world into the real meaning of his central thought upon God. It was the pledge of his truth, and thus made possible mankinds reconciliation with God.

Finally, in the same way, the life, the mind and the personality of Jesus will not be understood till we have realized by some intimate experience something of the worth and beauty of the countless souls that in every century have found and still find in him the Alpha and Omega of their being. For in the Gospels the last word of every one of them is "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 4:

The Followers of Jesus.

Two things stand out, when we study the character of the early church, its great complexity and variety, and its unity in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In spite of the general levelling which Greek culture and Roman government had made all over the Mediterranean world, the age-long influences of race and climate and cult were still at work. For when men looked at the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire.

The same general characteristics are to be seen, which were manifested in other ways before the Christian era. There is the great West of Italy, Gaul and Africa, Latin in outlook, but with strong local variations. There is the region of Asia Minor and Greece, where the church is Hellenistic in every sense of the word, very Greek upon the surface and less Greek underneath, again with marked contrasts due to geography and race-distribution. Again there is the Christian South; Alexandria, with its Christian community, Greek and Jewish, and a little known hinterland, where Christian thought spread. There was Palestine with a group of Jewish Christians, very clearly differentiated. And Eastward there rose a Syrian Christendom, which as late as the fourth century kept a character of its own.

There soon however appeared that desire for uniformity. A great deal, of course, was common to all regions of the world; the new story and the new experience, an unphilosophized group of facts, which now, under the stimulus of man's habit of speculation, began to be interpreted and to be related in all sorts of ways to the general experience of men. No wonder there was diversity. It took centuries to achieve a uniform account of the Christian faith.

The recruits came, as the Christians, from every race of mankind, and they brought with them much that was of value in national preconceptions and characteristics. The presence of Jew, Greek, Roman, Syrian and Phrygian, made it impossible for the church to be anything but universal; and if at times her methods of reconciling somewhat incompatible contributions were unscientific, still in practice she achieved the task and gained accordingly. Where the Empire failed in imposing unity by decree, the church produced it instinctively.

Seneca and the Stoics had played with the fancy of man's being equal, to God, a folly impossible for a Jewish mind. It was the Jews who gave the world the "oracles of God" in the Old Testament, who invested Christianity for the moment with the dignity of an ancient history and endowed it for all time with a unique inheritance of religious experience in the Old Testament.

Equally, the chief contribution of the Greek was his demand, that Christianity must be universal, and he was emphatic in insisting on a larger outlook than the Jewish.

Initially, there was the opposition; the contempt, the persecution and the mayters. One of the latter was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena. One of the most poignant things he wrote was, "He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."

For to these new converts, Jesus was pre-eminently the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of immortality, and it made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised; women, artisans, and slaves.

Socrates with the hemlock cup and the brave Thrasea were figures that men loved and honoured. But here were all sorts of common people doing the same thing as Socrates and Thrasea, cheerfully facing torture and death "for the name's sake"—and it was a name of contempt, too. "Christ's people" / Christianoi.

One interesting aspect was that Christianity retained its own character in the face of the most desperate efforts of its friends to turn it into a philosophy congenial to the philosophies of the day. This was the result of the strong hold it had taken upon innumerable simple people, who had found in it the power of God in the transformation of their own characters and instincts, and who clung to Jesus Christ, to the great objective facts of his incarnation and his death upon the cross, as the firm foundations against which the floods of theory might beat in vain.

When we pass on to the early explanations of Jesus, we come into a region peculiarly difficult. A later age obscured the divergences of early theory. Some opinions the church decisively rejected; some early Christians would have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute and inconceivable Being. Nor would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show, while the divine Christ was far away.

But two theories, one of older Jewish, and the other of more recent Alexandrian origin, the church accepted and blended, though they do not necessarily belong to each other.

The one theory is Paul's, especially to all who lean with him to the Hebrew view of things. A Jew, a native of a Hellenistic city, a citizen of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for experience, he passed from Pharisaism to Christ. For him the mediating idea was righteousness.

At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. But it seems that the serenity and good conscience of Christian martyrs impressed their persecutor, who was not happy in his own conscience; and at last the thought came, that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. Thus, Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering.

Opinion varies as to how far we should seek the origin of the church in the teaching and work of Jesus. He does not appear to be responsible either for the name or the idea of the church. Minds of the class to which his belongs have as a rule little or no interest in organizations and arrangements, and nothing can be more alien to the tone and spirit of his thinking than the ecclesiastical idea as represented by Cyprian and Ignatius. But that out of the group of followers who lived with Jesus, a society should grow, is natural; and societies instinctively organize themselves. The Jew offered the pattern of a theocracy, and the Roman of a hierarchy of officials, but it took two centuries to produce the church of Cyprian.

The rise of the church was accompanied by the rise of mysteries.There is a growing consensus that Jesus instituted no sacraments, yet Paul found the rudiments of them among the Christians and believed he had the warrant of Jesus for the heightening which he gave to them. Ignatius speaks of the Ephesians "breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die". That such ideas should emerge in the Christian community is natural enough, when we consider its environment, a world without natural science, steeped in belief in every kind of magic and enchantment, and full of public and private religious societies, every one of which had its mysteries and miracles and its blood-bond with its peculiar deity. Baptism similarly took on a miraculous colour.

How did this period of adjustment end? One could argue that Nero's treatment of the Christians waked distaste in Rome itself. But it seems that in the end it was the martyrdoms that made the church.

[mesolzhenitsy]

Sire,
After so many a silent intervals this is great!
Prof. MES SOLZHENITSOF

[MANICHAEAN]

Thank you Prof. Take good care.

M.

[Ecurb]

I recently read Gibbon's chapters on the Rise of Christianity. Gibbon was an atheist, and he tries to suggest a scientific approach to the rise of Christianity (as opposed to claiming that it arose because of revealed truth).

Two of his arguments are:

1) The promise of immortality was attractive. This may have been true. Christian leaders had (on occasion) to forbid their flocks from choosing martyrdom (because of the promise of Paradise). However, Christianity was not the only belief system to promise immortality. Egypt was obsessed with it.

2) Christianity arose as a "World Religion" (accepting adherents from all nationalities and races) because such acceptance mirrored the Roman Empire. Judaism was clearly tribal -- but the world was no longer tribal. Just as the Emperor ruled the entire world politically, God ruled the entire world spiritually.

Gibbon continues in more detail, but since it's been a week since I read the chapters, I can't remember them. I'd suggest that the notion of Christian brotherhood was attractive. In societies in which bonds of kinship were essential to law, economics, and social interaction, the "community" of Christian brotherhood created a faith in and a longing for the essence of that brotherhood. As we move toward a agnostic society, we see similar attractions in the Fundamentalist churches today: adherents base their social life around the Church and the brotherhood it offers. In the days in which the Christians were persecuted by Rome, this sense of brotherhood, and the desire to communicate one's worthiness for that brotherhood, must have been intense.

[MANICHAEAN]

Thanks for your input Ecurb.

I really wonder how much of an atheist Gibbon was? In writing history; unless you are just reciting dates and events, your underlying views inevitably will emerge.

Thus in the chapter you refer to in “The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire,” Gibbon tries to attain neutral ground by stating right in the beginning:

“A candid but rational inquiry into the progress and establishment of Christianity may be considered as a very essential part of the history of the Roman empire.”

But when he gets to the section titled “ Miraculous Powers of the Primitive Church,” I get the impression he is wavering; for the reason that he acknowledges, that “The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic grounds.”

Later on, Gibbon seems almost grudgingly to write:

“the Christian church, from the time of the apostles and their first disciples, has claimed an uninterrupted succession of miraculous powers, the gift of tongues, of vision, and of prophecy, the power of expelling daemons, of healing the sick, and of raising the dead.”

He talks even later of “the Divine artist,” and “Divine justice.” Perhaps a slip of emphasis on his part?

Whatever his intentions, Gibbon is well worth reading. You may not agree with his views, but the prose soars effortlessly.

Here into the 4th week of 12 of the lockdown and self isolation in the UK, I have been given the peace I appreciate, to work on this thread, and endeavouring to pull it together in a coherant manner.

Stay safe.
M.

[Jackson Richardson]

I think he was a deist rather than an atheist. He certainly has great contempt for women, monks, non-Europeans and the vulgar. But I have to say that I do enjoy reading someone with such a sense of style and irony.

Later he has a chapter of Mohammed and the rise of Islam which he rather admires as a "manly" religion, by comparison with Christianity.

[MANICHAEAN]

Thanks Jackson.

I never knew about his aversion to: the fair sex, cowled acolytes, natives south of Calais, or individuals lacking in a classical education. Thanks for the info.

I also never really got into the chapter on Mohammed. After something like 12 years working in; Saudi, Qatar & Iran, any discussion on Islam would have been spiritual overload to me.

However your raising the subject of the Prophet motivated me to read a bit of it in the Decline & Fall. First impressions are that I doubt if Gibbon ever visited Arabian Peninsular, as his initial descriptions seem to be inauthenic and based on what he gleaned from the literature at the time.

[Ecurb]

I think he was a deist rather than an atheist. He certainly has great contempt for women, monks, non-Europeans and the vulgar. But I have to say that I do enjoy reading someone with such a sense of style and irony.

Later he has a chapter of Mohammed and the rise of Islam which he rather admires as a "manly" religion, by comparison with Christianity.

I'm not sure why I thought Gibbon was an atheist -- I probably read that he was a non-Christian. C.S. Lewis thought Norse Mythology was a "manly" creed, because the Norse were on the side of the Gods even though they were doomed to be losers (as opposed to most religions which worship God the Almighty).

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 5.

The Jewish attack on Jesus.

Israel had stood for monotheism and that was not the monotheism of Greek philosophy; a dogma of the schools consistent with the cults of Egypt and Phrygia. The whole nation had been consecrated to the worship of One God, a personal God, who had, where Israel was concerned, no hint of philosophic apathy. The Jew was now asked by the Christian to admit a second God, a God beside the Creator.

Thus it is understandable that the Jews, if anything, were obliged to develop a propaganda of their own about Jesus. For everything that was distinctive of their race and their religion; the past of Israel, the Messiah and the glorious future, the symbols of family religion, and the One God Himself; all was to be surrendered by any Jew who became a Christian.

But the legislation of Moses was for a people and for a time; it was not for mankind and eternity. It was the prophecy of this new Christian legislator, who whould repeal a large part of the existing code and enact one that would be spiritual, final and eternal.

From the Christian side, the Apologists quoted a passage of Jeremiah, with the advantage of using it in the true sense in which it was written.

"Behold the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not that which I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord. But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people."

On the Jewish side, they were still far from being assured on the warrant of the Old Testament, that Jesus was the Messiah who would accomplish this great change. Why he, rather than any of the any others who might much more plausibly be called the Messiah?

There were two great canons in the operations of the Apologists. In the first place, they sought to show that all things prophesied of the Messiah were fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth; and, secondly, that everything which befel Jesus was prophesied of the Messiah.

They asked the questions: Who was it who walked in the garden, who wrestled with Jacob, who appeared in arms to Joshua, who spoke with Moses and with Abraham, who shut Noah into the ark, who was the fourth figure in the fiery furnace?

They felt that Scripture could provide a key. Can the Jew say, who it is whom Ezekiel calls the "angel of great counsel;" and the "man"; whom Daniel describes "as the Son of man"; whom Isaiah called "child," and David "Christ" and "God adored"; whom Moses called "Joseph"; whom Zechariah called "the daystar"; whom Isaiah again called the "sufferer", "Jacob"and "the Son of God"?

The answer the Apologists argued was given by Solomon in the eighth chapter of Proverbs; it is the Divine Wisdom, to whom all these names apply. When it is said "Let us make man," it is to be understood that the Ineffable communicated his design to his Wisdom, his Logos or Son, and the Son made man. The Son rained upon Sodom the fire and brimstone from the Father. It was the Son who appeared to men in all the many passages cited, the Son, Christ the Lord, God and Son of God, inseparable and unseverable from the Father, His Wisdom and His Word and His Might.

The Apologist began by explaining the mysteries of the two comings of Christ, first in humiliation, and afterwards in glory.

For the First Coming Tertullian quotes Isaiah, "he is led as a sheep to the slaughter"; and the Psalms, "made a little lower than the angels,"; while the Second Coming is to be read of in Daniel and the forty-fifth Psalm, and in the more passage of Zechariah "and then they shall know him whom they pierced." The paschal lamb is a type of the First Coming; and the two goats of Leviticus are types of the two Comings.

Thus, in the conflict of religions, Christianity had first to face Judaism, and it secured its freedom from the yoke of the past. It made the prophets and psalmists of Israel a permanent and integral part of Christian literature; and in all these ways it became more fit to be the faith of mankind, as it deepened its hold upon the universal religious experience. Yet it might be argued that it did so at the cost of a departure from the simplicity and candour of the mind of Jesus.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 6.

Early Debates:

We are apt to wonder to-day at the great political and national developments that have altered the whole aspect of Europe since the French Revolution, and to reflect sometimes on their rapidity.

Yet the past has its own stories of rapid change, and not the least striking of them is the disappearance of that world of thought which we call Classical.

By 180 A.D. nearly every distinctive mark of classical antiquity had gone; the old political ideas, the old philosophies, the old literatures, and much else with them.

Let us examine some of the more important voices of that time.

Firstly Marcus Aurelius in whose reign the signs of change became more evident, and men grew conscious that some transformation of the world was in progress. There was a great plague, barbarism was active upon the frontier of the Empire not so well able as it had fancied to defend itself; superstitions, Egyptian and Jewish, diverting men from the ordinary ways of civic duty; such were some of the symptoms that men marked. The state seemed to be sinking, and all that freedom of mind which was the distinctive boast of Hellenism was rapidly being lost.

Let us hone in specifically on the conflict of religions. Faith, doubt, irritation and fatalism are all represented. The most conspicuous men of letters of the age were undoubtedly the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself and his two contemporaries, Lucian of Samosata, and Apuleius of Madaura.

Though not in his day regarded as a man of letters, it is yet in virtue of his writing that Marcus Aurelius survives. His journal, with the title that tells its nature, "To Himself," is to-day perhaps an important book of antiquity. In his writings can be seen the peculiar mind of a solitary Emperor that seemed to portray him as the exemplar of Agnosticism. Meditative, tender and candid; yet hesitant and so far ineffectual, he is sensitive to so much that is positive and to so much that is negative, that the diary, in which his character is most intimately revealed, gives him a place of his own in the hearts of men wavering between the extremes. He is a man who neither believes, nor disbelieves either gods or atoms, and there is so much to be said both for and against each of the alternatives that decision is impossible.

We then move on to Lucian of Samosata. Here we have a man who seems to possess more wit than sympathy, and who found abundance of material in the follies of his age. Men were taking themselves desperately seriously; preaching interminable Philosophy, saving their souls, and communing with gods and dæmons in the most exasperating ways. Shams, impostures, and liars; so Lucian summed them up, and he did not conceal his opinion.

One of the main preoccupations of his age was with the gods, and Lucian of course could not leave them alone. His usual method was to accept them as being exactly what tradition made them, and then to set them in new and impossible situations.

Lucian differs from Voltaire in having less purpose and no definite principles. He had no design to overthrow religion in favour of something else; it is merely that the absurdity of it provoked him, and he enjoyed saying aloud, and with all the vigour of reckless wit, that religious belief was silly. If the effect was scepticism, it was a scepticism founded, not on philosophy, but on the off-hand judgment of what is called common-sense.

Various views have been held of Lucian's contribution to the religious movement of the age. But when one reflects, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers.

He failed to understand men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. His admirers to-day speak of him as one whose question was always "Is it true?" It is evident enough that his mockery of religion has some warrant in the follies and superstitions of his day. But such criticism as his, based upon knowledge incomplete and sympathy imperfect, is of little value.

Man must have felt the need of a religion; he must have had at some time the consciousness of imperative cravings and instincts which perhaps only a religion can satisfy. Such cravings are open to criticism, but men can neither be laughed out of them, nor indeed reasoned out of them; and however absurd a religion may seem, and however defective it may be, if it is still the only available satisfaction of the deepest needs of which men are conscious, it will hold its own, despite mockery and despite philosophy.

One more critic of religion remains to be noticed, Apuleius of Madaura. He explored the inter-relations of magic and religion in contemporary thought. He speculated on mediary divine powers, situated in that mid space of air, by whom our desires and our deserts reach the gods. These the Greeks call dæmons, carriers between human and heavenly, hence of prayers, thence of gifts; back and forth they fare, hence with petition, thence with sufficiency, interpreters and bringers of salvation.

“The Golden ***” is the chief work of Apuleius, where his hundreds of diminutives and neologisms, his antitheses, alliterations, assonances, figures and tropes, his brilliant invention, his fun and humour, have full scope and add pleasure to every fresh episode of the fairy-tale and of the larger and more miscellaneous tale of adventure in which it is set.

Was it true, this story of the ***? Augustine says that Apuleius "either disclosed or made up" these adventures. Both he and Lactantius had to show their contemporaries that there was a difference between the miracles of Apuleius and those of Christ.

In conclusion, we may ask what these individuals mentioned had to offer; and what they in turn could suggest to men whose concern in religion went deeper than the cure of physical disease, trance and self-conscious revelling in ceremony.

Some spiritual value still clung about the old religion, or it could not have found supporters, but how much else? Very little as it turned out.

[MANICHAEAN]

Note.

For *** read the equivalent of a female donkey!!!! and not ones butt.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 7.

Celsus.

Celsus' book, “True Word” was written in the latter part of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, or, more closely, to the year 178 A.D. He writes under the pressure of the barbarian inroads on the Northern frontier, of the Parthians in the East and of the great plague. His main concern is the Roman State, shaken by all these misfortunes, and doubly threatened by the passive disaffection of Christians within its borders. From what Turk and Mongol meant to Europe in the Middle Ages, we may divine how men felt about the white savages coming down upon them from the North.

His great purpose was the abandonment of particularism and the fusion of all parties for the general good. Celsus was above all, satisfied with the established order, alike in the regions of thought and of government. He mistrusted new movements, not least when they were so conspicuously alien to the Greek mind, as the new superstition of Christianity that came from Palestine.

He felt what he percieved to be the danger of it spreading higher up in society. If the Christian movement had been confined to people as vulgar and illiterate as he suggests, he might not have thought it worth his while to attack the new religion.

The Christian conception of the "descent of God" was repulsive to Celsus, for it meant contact with matter. "God's anger," too, he regarded as an impious idea, for anger is a passion to be frowned upon.

The ignominy of the life of Jesus was evidence to Celsus of the falsity of his claim to be God's son. He bitterly taunts Christians with following a child of shame, "God's would not be a body like yours, nor begotten as you were begotten, Jesus!"

He reviles Jesus for the Passion,"unhelped by his Father and unable to help himself.". He reproaches Jesus with seeking to escape the cross. As to the resurrection, "if Jesus wished really to display his divine power, he ought to have appeared to the actual men who reviled him, and to him who condemned him and to all, for, of course, he was no longer afraid of any man, seeing he was deaty." Or, better still, to show his Godhead, he might have vanished from the gibbet.

Celsus surveys the main points of Christian history and teaching. As far as he is concerned they have no real grounds beneath them. The basis of the church is "faction, and fear of those without; those are the things that establish the faith for them." Faction is their keynote, taken from the Jews at first; and faction splits them up into innumerable sects beside the "great church, the one thing they have in common, is the name."

Celsus maintains the duty of "living by the ancestral usages," "each people worshipping its own traditional deities.”At the last comes his great plea. Human authority is of divine ordinance. "To the Emperor all on earth is given; and whatever you receive in life is from him."

If you invalidate this thought , probably the Emperor will punish you. For if all men were to do as you do, nothing will prevent the Emperor being left alone and deserted, and all things on earth falling into the power of the most lawless and barbarous savages, with the result that neither of your religion nor of the true wisdom would there be left among men. You will hardly allege that if the Romans were persuaded by you and forsook all their usages as to gods and men, and called upon your 'Most High' or whatever you like, he would descend and fight for them and they would need no other help.

The Christian sentiment that it is desirable for all who inhabit the Empire, Greeks and barbarians, Asia, Europe and Libya, to agree to one law or custom, is foolish and impracticable. So Celsus calls on the Christians "to come to the help of the Emperor with all their might and labour with him as right requires, fight on his behalf, take the field with him, if he call on you, and share the command of the legions with him, and to do this for the salvation of laws and religion."

It can be seen that Celsus confines himself essentially to the charges of folly, perversity, and want of national feeling. An excessive opinion of the value of the human soul and an absurd fancy of God's interest in man are two of the chief faults he sees in Christianity.

Confident in the truth of his premisses and the conclusions that follow from them, Celsus charged the Christians with folly and dogmatism. Yet it would be difficult to maintain that they were more dogmatic than himself; they at least had ventured on the experiment of a new life, that was to bring ancient Philosophy to a new test. They were the researchers in spiritual things, and he the traditionalist.

The portrait which Celsus drew of Jesus is an amazing caricature; the ignorant Jewish conjuror, who garbles Plato, is hardly so much as a parody. It meant that Celsus did not understand the central thing in the new faith.

Yet for Celsus it may be pleaded that his object was perhaps less the reconversion of Christians to the old faith than to prevent the perversion of pagans to the new. But here too he failed, for he did not understand even the midway people with whom he was dealing.

Celsus could not foresee all that we look back upon. But it stands to his credit that he recognised the dangers which threatened the ancient civilization, dangers from German without and Christian within. He had not the religious temperament; he was more the statesman in his habit of mind, and he clearly loved his country. The appeal with which he closes is a proposal of peace and toleration.