No More Learning

The fourth and fifth centuries A. D. were marked by the rise of no
new school of metaphysics and were illustrated by only one pre-eminent
philosopher. In theology the period can boast great names, perhaps the
greatest since the Apostles of Christ, but in philosophy it is singularly
barren. Plotinus (A. D. 205-270), the chief exponent and practical
founder of that reconstruction of Greek philosophy known as Neo-
platonism, had indeed many disciples; but Proclus the Lycian (A. D.
412-485) is the only one of them who can be said to have advanced in
any marked degree the study of pure thought. The mind of the age
was inclined towards religion, or at least religious idealism, rather than
towards metaphysics. Nor is this matter for surprise when we remember
the spiritual revival of the centuries preceding, a movement which began
under the Flavians and had by no means spent its force when Constantine
came to the throne. From an early period in the Empire, and more
especially under the Severi, men were turning in disgust and disillusion
to religion as a refuge from the evils of the world in which they lived,
as a sphere in which they could realise dreams of better things than
those begotten of their present discontent. This fact explains the
quickening of the older cults and the ready adoption of new ones, which
issued in a promiscuous pantheon and a bewildering medley of religious
rites and practices. Then came philosophy and sought to bring order
out of chaos. It tried, and with some success, to clear away superstition
and to raise the believer in gods many to a living communion with the
One divine of which they were but different manifestations. There is no
doubt that Proclus, who unified to some extent the heterogeneous system
of Plotinus, was engaged in the proper business of philosophy, viz. the
contemplation of metaphysical truth; there is equally no doubt that
in practice the philosophy of the age was addressed to the same human
need as its religion. And that need was a better knowledge of God.
It is most significant that the final rally of the old religions was under
the banner of a philosophy: Julian and his supporters were Neo-
platonists.


## p. 569 (#599) ############################################

The Persistence of Paganism
569
the core.
We
may therefore claim that the temper of the times was on the
whole religious, concerned chiefly with man's relation to God; and the
fact that the Church had recently achieved so signal a victory is in
itself an indication that the best intellects had gravitated towards her.
Thus the highest thought was Christian, finding expression in those
systematised ideas about God which are summed up in the word
theology.
It would however be a grave mistake to suppose that the age which
saw the triumph of the Christian idea and the establishment of Christi-
anity as the state religion was entirely of one mind and Christian to
Side by side with the great current of Christian thought and
belief, that was now running free after a long subterranean course, there
Aowed a large volume of purely pagan opinion or preconception, such
interfiltration as took place being carried on by unseen channels. Thus,
while eager and courageous spirits were contending for the Faith with
all kinds of weapons against all kinds of foes throughout the Empire,
men (and some of them Christian men) were writing and speaking as
though no such thing as Christianity had come into the world. And the
age that witnessed the conversion of Constantine and inherited the benefits
of that act was an age that in the East listened to the interminable hex-
ameters of Nonnus Dionysiaca, which contain no conscious reference to
Christianity; that laughed over the epigrams of Cyrus; that delighted
in many frankly pagan love-stories and saw nothing surprising in the
attribution of one of them (the Aethiopica) to the Christian bishop
Heliodorus ; that in the West applauded the panegyrists when they
compared emperor and patron to the hierarchy of gods and heroes; and
that in extremity found its consolation in philosophy rather than in the
Gospel
This persistence of paganism in the face of obvious defeat was due
to a number of co-operating causes. Roman patriotism, which saw in
worship of the gods and the secret name of Rome the only safeguard
of the eternal city; the cults of Cybele, Isis, Mithra, and Orpheus, with
their dreams of immortality; the stern tradition of the Stoic emperor
Marcus ; the lofty ideals of the Neoplatonists—all these factors
helped to delay the final triumph. But probably the strongest and
most persistent conservative influence was that of the rhetoric by which
European education was dominated then as it was by logic in the
Middle Ages, and as it has been since the Renaissance by humane
letters. Rhetoric lay in wait for the boy as he left the hands of the
grammarian, and was his companion at every stage of his life. It went
with him through school and university; it formed his taste and trained
or paralysed his mind; but more than this, it opened to him the
1 The most famous instance of such reversion is afforded by Boethius, who died
in prison A. D. 525, but who fairly represents the age before him.
сн. хх.


## p. 570 (#600) ############################################

570
The influence of Rhetoric
a
avenues of success and reward. For although by the fourth century
oratory had lost its old political power, rhetoric still remained a bread-
winning business. It was always lucrative, and it led to high position,
even to the consulship, as in the case of Ausonius the rhetor (A. D. 309–392),
who was Gratian's tutor and afterwards quaestor, praefect of Gaul, and
finally consul. Here is cause enough to account for the long life and
paramount influence of rhetoric in the schools. Now the instrument
with which both schoolmaster and professor fashioned their pupils was
pagan mythology and pagan history. The great literatures of the past
supplied the theme for declamation and exercise. Rules of conduct were
deduced from maxims that passed under the names of Pythagoras, Solon,
Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius. It was inevitable that the thoughts of
the grown man should be expressed in terms of paganism when the
education of the youth was upon these lines. And this education was
for all, not only for the children of unbelievers. Gregory of Nyssa
himself informs us that he attended the classes of heathen rhetoricians.
So did Gregory of Nazianzus and his brother Caesarius, and so did Basil.
John Chrysostom was taught by Libanius, the last of the Sophists, who
claimed that it was what he learnt in the schools that led his friend
Julian back to the worship of the gods. Even Tertullian, who would
not suffer a Christian to teach rhetoric out of heathen books, could not
forbid his learning it from them. They were indeed the only means
to knowledge. Efforts were made to provide Christian books modelled
upon them. Proba, wife of a praefect of Rome, compelled Virgil to
prophesy of Christ by the simple means of reading Christianity
into a cento of lines from the Aeneid. Juvencus the presbyter dared,
in Jerome's phrase, to submit the majesty of the Gospel to the laws of
metre, and to this end composed four books of Evangelic history.
The two Apollinarii turned the O. T. into heroic and Pindaric verse,
and the N. T. into Platonic dialogues; Nonnus the author of the
Dionysiaca rewrote St John's Gospel in hexameters; Eudocia, consort
of Theodosius II, composed a poetical paraphrase of the Law and of some
of the Prophets. But as soon as Julian's edict against Christian teachers
was withdrawn, grammarians and rhetors returned to the classics with
renewed zest and a sense of victory gained. Jerome and Augustine,
both of them students and teachers, pointed out the educational capacity
of the sacred books; but some 80 years after the publication of the de
doctrina christiana, in which Augustine as a teacher urged the claims of
Scripture, we find Ennodius the Christian bishop speaking of rhetoric as
queen of the arts and of the world. It was reserved for Cassiodorus
(A. D. 480-575), the father of literary monasticism in the West, to
attempt the realisation of Augustine's dream.
Like Ennodius his older contemporary, Cassiodorus loved and
practised rhetoric, but he had visions of a better kind of education,
and in 535-6 he made an abortive attempt to found a school of


## p. 571 (#601) ############################################

The influence of Rhetoric. Macrobius
571
Christian literature at Rome, “in which the soul might gain eternal
salvation, and the tongue acquire beauty by the exercise of the
chaste and pure eloquence of Christians. " His project was ill-timed;
it was the moment of the invasion of Belisarius, and Rome had other
business on hand than schemes of education and reform. The schools
were pagan to the end, and it may be said with truth that rhetoric
retarded the progress of the Faith, and that Christianity when it
conquered the heathen world was captured by the system of education
which it found in force. The result of rhetorical training is very plainly
seen in all the literature of the period and in the characters of the
writers. Even the Fathers are deeply tinged with it, and Jerome
himself admits that one must always distinguish in their writings
between what is said for the sake of argument (dialektinÔS) and what
is said as truth. Though perjury and false witness were heavily
punished, lying was never an ecclesiastical offence, and rigid veracity
cannot be claimed as a constant characteristic of any Christian writer
of the period except Athanasius, Augustine, and (outside his panegyrics)
Eusebius of Caesarea.
Reference has already been made to some of the Eastern authors who
wrote in the full current of Christianity but with no sensible trace of its
influence. Passing West, we find ourselves in better company than that of
the novelists and epigrammatists, and among men who even more effectively
illustrate the tendencies of the time. By Macrobius we are introduced to a
little group of gentlemen who meet together in a friendly way for the
discussion of literary, antiquarian, and philosophic matters. Most of the
characters of the Saturnaliu are known to us from the history of the day
and from their own writings, which express opinions sufficiently similar to
those which Macrobius lends them in his symposium to make it a faithful
mirror of fourth century thought and conversation. There is Praetextatus,
at whose house the company first assembles to keep the Saturnalia. He
is a scholar and antiquary, a statesman and philosopher, the hierophant
of half-a-dozen cults, formerly praefect of the city and proconsul of
Achaia. His dignity and urbanity, his piety, his grave humour, his
overflowing erudition, his skill in drawing out his friends, render him
in all respects the proper president of the feast of reason. There is
Flavian the younger, a man of action and of greater mark in the real
world than Praetextatus, who however plays but a small part on
Macrobius' stage. There is Q. Aurelius Symmachus, the wealthy
senator and splendid noble, the zealous conservative and patron of
letters, who opposed Ambrose in the affair of the Altar of Victory and
brought Augustine to Milan as teacher of rhetoric. There are two
members of the house of Albinus, chiefly remarkable for their worship
of Virgil. There is Servius, the young but erudite critic, who carries
his scholarship with so much grace and modesty. There is Evangelus,
whose rough manners and uncouth opinions serve as a foil to the strict
a
CH. XX.


## p. 572 (#602) ############################################

572
Macrobius. Martianus Capella. The Querolus
correctness of the rest. There is Disarius the doctor, the friend of
Ambrose, and Horus, whose name proclaims his foreign birth. These
persons of the Saturnalia we know to have been living men'. What
are the topics of their conversation? The range is astonishing, from
antiquities (the origin of the Calendar, of the Saturnalia, of the toga
praetextata), linguistics (derivations and wondrous etymologies), literature
(especially Cicero and Virgil), science (medicine, physiology and astro-
nomy), religion and philosophy (a syncretism of all the cults), ethics
(chiefly Stoical, e. g. the morality of slavery and suicide), down to table
manners and the jokes of famous men. In a word, everything that a
Roman gentleman ought to know is treated somewhat mechanically but
with elaborate fulness--except Christianity, of which there is no hint.
And yet one of the Albini had a Christian wife and the other was
almost certainly himself a Christian.
This silence on a topic which must have touched all the characters
to whom Macrobius lends utterance is equally felt when we pass to fact
from fiction. Symmachus in the whole collection of his private letters
refers but rarely to religion and never once to Christianity. Claudian,
the poet courtier of Christian emperors, has only one passage which betrays
a clear consciousness of the new faith, and that is in a lampoon upon
a bibulous soldier. It is the same with the panegyrists, the same with
allegorist and dramatist. Martianus Capella, whose manual of the arts,
entitled The Nuptials of Mercury and Philology, represents the best
culture of the epoch and enjoyed an almost unexampled popularity
during the Middle Ages, passes over Christianity without a word. The
anonymous Querolus, an agreeable comédie à thèse written for the
entertainment of a great Gallican household and obviously reflecting
the serious thought of its audience, is entirely dominated by the Stoical
and heathen notion of Fate? . This general silence cannot be due to
ignorance. Rather it is due to Roman etiquette. The great conserva-
tive nobles, the writers who catered for their instruction and amusement,
would seem to have agreed to ignore the new religion.
We must now consider in some detail the character of this per-
sistent paganism, especially as it is presented to us by Macrobius, either
in the Saturnalia or in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, to
which last we owe our knowledge of the treatise of Cicero bearing
that title.
The philosophy or religion of these two works is pure Neoplatonism,
drawn straight from Plotinus. Macrobius seems to have known the
Greek original; he gives actual citations from the Enneads in several
a
1 The only one about whom there seems to be any doubt is Evangelus, but see
Glover, Life and Letters, p. 175.
2 For the Christian idea of Fate=Providence, see Augustine, e. g. de civ. Dei, v. 8:
ipsam itaque praecipue Dei summi voluntatem, cuius potestas insuperabiliter per
cuncta porrigitur, eos appellare fatum sic probatur.


## p. 573 (#603) ############################################

Macrobius
573
places, and one passage (Comment. 1. 14) contains as good a summary
of the Plotinian Trinity as was possible in Latin.
The universe is the temple of God, eternal like Him and filled with
His presence. He, the first cause, is the source and origin of all that
is and all that seems to be. By the overflowing fertility of His majesty
He created from himself Mind (mens). Mind retains the image of its
author so long as it looks towards him ; when it looks backward it
creates soul (anima). Soul in its turn keeps the likeness of mind while
it looks towards mind, but when it turns away its gaze it degenerates
insensibly, and, although itself incorporeal, gives rise to bodies celestial
(the stars) and terrestrial (men, beasts, vegetables). Between man and
the stars there is real kinship, as there is between man and God.
Thus all things from the highest to the lowest are held together
in an intimate and unbroken connexion, which is what Homer meant
when he spoke of a golden chain let down by God from heaven to
earth.
Then Macrobius describes the soul's descent. Tempted by the
desire for a body, it falls from where it dwelt on high with the stars
its brethren. It passes through the seven spheres that separate heaven
from earth, and in its passage acquires the several qualities which go to
make up the composite nature of man.
As it descends it gradually
in a sort of intoxication sheds its attributes and forgets its heavenly
home, though not in all cases to the same extent. This descent into
the body is a kind of temporary death, for the body owua is also the
tomb or oñua (an old Platonic play upon words), a tomb' from which
the soul can rise at the body's death. Man is indeed immortal, the
real man is the soul which dominates the things of sense. But although
the body's death means life to the soul, the soul may not anticipate
its bliss by voluntary act, but must purify itself and wait, for “we must
not hasten the end of life while there is still possibility of improve-
ment. " Heaven is shut against all but those who win purity, and the
body is not only a tomb; it is a hell (infera). Cicero promised heaven
to all true patriots; Macrobius knows a higher virtue than patriotism,
viz. contemplation of the divine, for the earth is but a point in the
universel and glory but a transient thing. The wise man is he who
does his duty upon earth with his eyes fixed upon heaven.
If beside this pure and lofty idealism, grafted upon Roman patriotic
feeling, we set the somewhat crude syncretism of the Saturnalia, we have
a true reflection of all the higher thought of fourth century Paganism-
except dæmonology and its lower accompaniment, magic. Of the
former we have no direct indication beyond a doubtful etymology.
The latter is present, but only in its least objectionable form, viz.
divination. The omission is the more remarkable since dæmonology
וי
1 Cf. Boethius, de cons. phil. 11. pr. 7.
CH. XX.


## p. 574 (#604) ############################################

574
Dæmonology.
Magic. The Eternal City
was
men.
a salient feature of the Neoplatonic system, and magic was
its inevitable outcome. For the god of Neoplatonism was a meta-
physical abstraction, yet a cause, and therefore bound to act, since
a cause must have an effect. Being above action Himself, there must
be a secondary cause or causes. And the Platonic philosophy provided
a host of intermediary beings who bridged the chasm between earth
and God, and who interpreted and conveyed on high the prayers of
The ranks of these divine agents were largely supplied by the
old heroes and dæmons, who in the popular imagination were omni-
potent, watching over human affairs. All dæmons however were not
equally beneficent. At the bottom of the scale of nature lurked evil
dæmons, powers of darkness ceaselessly scheming man's destruction. It
was to these supernatural beings, good and bad, that his mind turned
in hope or fear. He dreaded the evil dæmons and sought to charm
them; he loved the good and addressed to them his prayers and
worship. Plotinus indeed forbad but could not prevent the worship
of dæmons, for he admitted their real existence. With Porphyry
(d. c. 305) the tendency towards dæmonological rites is clearly marked ;
with Proclus the habit is established.
Thus upon a monotheistic basis there arose a new polytheism, in
which the Olympian deities, whose credit had been shaken by rational-
istic philosophy, were largely replaced by dæmons and demigods.
Theology, which is presented on its purer side by Macrobius, degenerated
in popular usage into theurgy; the ethical and intellectual aspirations
after union with the divine were replaced by mere magic. Yet magic
had the countenance of the philosophers, who, distinguishing carefully
between white and black magic (to borrow later terms) repudiated the
latter while they allowed the former. And although theurgy was a
sharp declension from the principles of Platonism, whether old or new,
it was very natural. It was extremely venerable and it was able to take
the colour of science. The doctrine of the sympathy of the seen and
the unseen worlds, together with the gradual recognition of the mighty
power of cosmic law, even when controlled by spirits or dæmons, resulted
necessarily in an attempt to coerce these beings by means of material
things, almost, one might say, by means of chemical reagents. So, the
larger the knowledge of nature and its operations, the wider the spread
of magical practices. Magic had a living force which Christianity was
for ages powerless to break.
Another potent factor in keeping alive the flame of Paganism was the
belief in the eternal destiny of Rome. Christian writers in the second
century, like Tertullian, held that Rome would last as long as the world
and that her fall would coincide with the Day of Judgment. Christian
writers before whose eyes the city fell without the coming of the Day,
stood bewildered and in part regretful. The news dashed the pen from
the hand of Jerome in his cell at Bethlehem: “the human race is included


## p. 575 (#605) ############################################

The Eternal City. Claudian. Rutilius
575
7
in the ruins," he wrote ; and Augustine, while he looks for the founding
of an abiding and divine city in the room of that which had disappeared,
and taunts the Romans with the poor protection afforded them by their
gods, declares that the whole world groaned at the fall of Rome and is
himself proud of her great past and of the qualities of Roman endurance
and faith that gave her so high a place among the nations. Orosius,
again, who carried on the plan and thought of the de civitate Dei, to
whose mind the Roman Empire was founded upon blood and sin, yet
proclaims, as Augustine his master had proclaimed, that Roman peace
and Roman culture were greater and would last longer than Rome
herself.
If such were the sentiments of Christian writers towards the imperial
city, which had been much more of a step-mother than a mother to their
faith, what must pagans have felt for the home of their religion, upon
which Plutarch had exhausted his store of eulogistic metaphor (cf. de
fortuna Rom. ), which to Julian was Deodiań, ådapavtivn, “dear to the
gods, invincible,” whose piety might surely claim divine protection ?
To discover this we have but to turn the pages of Claudian and
Rutilius Namatianus. Claudian (A. A. D. 400) was not a Roman born,
but a Greek-speaking native of Egypt. Yet he has Juvenal's contempt
for "Greek Quirites" and an unconcealed hatred of New Rome, and he
finds his true inspiration in the great city on the Tiber whom he addresses
as Roma dea, consort of Jupiter, mother of arts and arms and of the
“Rise, reverend mother,” he cries, “and with firm hope
trust the favouring gods. Lay aside old age's craven fear. O city
coeval with the sky, iron Fate shall never master thee till Nature
changes her laws and rivers run backward. " But it is not only the
city with her pomp and beauty, her hills and temples, the home of gods
and Fortune, that compels his praise. The empire of which she was
the visible head, an empire won by bloodshed, it is true, but kept
together by the willing love of all the various races that have passed
into the fabric—this is Claudian's real theme, the mighty diapason that
runs through all his utterance and redeems his panegyric of Roman
noble and emperor from the charge of mere servility.
We have said that Claudian hardly ever refers directly to Christianity,
and indeed echoes of spiritual language in his verse are faint and un-
certain. The hostility which he must have felt against the religion
that was sapping the seats of the ancient worship is to be gathered from
hints rather than from direct expression. That hostility lies nearer the
surface in the Return from exile (A. D.
416) of Rutilius Claudius Namati-
anus, a great Gaulish lord and friend of Roman lords, who betrays
more clearly than Claudian the sentiments of the ruling class. But
even in Rutilius the allusions to Christianity are veiled. As a high
official (he was praefect of the city) he could not openly attack the
religion of the emperor, and must content himself with fulminations
world's peace.
сн. Хх.


## p. 576 (#606) ############################################

576
The De Civitate Dei. Orosius
against Judaism, “the root of superstition,” and the monks whose life
is a voluntary death to life, its pleasures, and its duties? .
It is almost needless to say that Rutilius the Gaul shares the belief
of Claudian the Egyptian in the destiny of Rome. The sight of the
temples still shining in the sun after the Gothic invasion was to him
an earnest of her perennial youth. “ Allia did not keep back the
punishment of Brennus. ” Rome will rise more glorious for her present
discomfiture. Ordo renascendi est, crescere posse malis. This faith in
Rome meant of course faith in the gods who had made her great, and
good Romans all believed in them and were eager to maintain the
national cult with which Rome's welfare was bound up. Roman worship
was at all times directed mainly towards the attainment of material
blessings, and the material disasters which, despite the optimism of
Rutilius and his circle, lay heavy on the city, were attributed to the
anger of forsaken deities. How, asked Symmachus, could Rome bring
herself to abandon those under whose protection her conquests had been
made and her power established ? The appeal to the gods was already
more than two centuries old, and now the disaster seemed to justify it.
In answer to it Augustine took up his pen and wrote the City of God.
It occupied the spare moments of his episcopal life for thirteen years
(A. D. 413-426), and, with all its defects, it remains a noble example of
the new philosophy of history, and sets in vivid contrast the two
civilisations from whose fusion sprang the Middle Ages. He answers
the heathen complaints one by one. Christianity was not responsible
for Rome's disaster. The Christian enemy even tried to mitigate it,
and Christian charity saved many pagans.
Had Rome been really
prosperous ? Her history is dark with calamity. Had the gods really
protected her ? Remember Cannae and the Caudine Forks. These
boasted gods have ever been but broken reeds, from the fall of Troy
onwards. The glory of Rome (which he admits) is due, under the
Christian's God, to Roman courage and patriotism. This God has a
destiny for Rome and He means her to be the eternal city of a regenerate
race. Such is the main subject of the first ten books. The next twelve
develop the contrast between the city of men and the city of God,
the one built upon love of self to the exclusion of God, the other built
upon the love of God to the exclusion of self. The history of the
world is briefly sketched, but the elaboration of the historical theme,
on which he set great store, was entrusted to his disciple, Orosius, a
young Spanish monk who came to Hippo in A. D. 414. Orosius' cue was
this : the world, far from being more miserable than before the advent
of Christianity, was really more prosperous and happy. Etna was less
active than of old, the locusts consumed less, the barbarian invasions
1 Cf. de reditu, 11. 383–398, in the interpretation of which I follow Pichon,
Les derniers écrivains profanes, p. 266, against Dill and Keene, who hold that the
passage is definitely anti-Christian.


## p. 577 (#607) ############################################

Salvian. Sidonius Apollinaris. Neoplatonism
577
were no more than merciful warnings. Here is an optimism as false in
its way as that of Rutilius; but it shews the spirit that carried Europe
safe through the darkness that was coming.
Thirty years later the situation had changed ; optimism was difficult,
it could no longer be said with Orosius that the world was “only tickled
with fleas,” and none the worse for it. Under the almost universal
dominion of the barbarian, the old complaints of the heathen against
heaven were now heard on the lips of the Christians. Why had a special
dispensation of suffering accompanied the triumph of the Cross ? Salvian
the Gaul takes up the theme and in his treatise On the Government of the
World compares Roman vice with barbarian virtue. His brush is too
heavily charged: he protests too much; but he undoubtedly helped his
contemporaries to recover tone, to bear the burdens laid upon them with
resignation, and to see the guiding hand of Providence in their misfortunes.
Salvian has not the faith of Augustine and Orosius in the future of the
Empire; for him the future was with the new races. But Sidonius Apolli-
naris (c. 430–489), who perhaps saw them closer and at any rate describes
them more minutely, is very loth to allow the ascendancy of the “stinking
savages" over Rome, which is still the one city where the only strangers
are slaves and barbarians. Thus even when Roman citizens were
bowing their heads to fate, even seeking help and an emperor from
the hated Greeks, the old love of Rome was strong, the sense of her
greatness hardly dimmed. It is not difficult to see how a city which
could command so much affection even from Christians served as a strong
support to those who for her sake strove to uphold her gods.
Meanwhile the religion which men of letters and Roman patriots
passed over in silent contempt or attacked with covert hatred had been
gathering notions from the very sources which fostered opposition to it.
“Spoil the Egyptians” was Augustine's advice, and not a few distinctive
Neoplatonist tenets were borrowed by Christian theologians and lived
on through the Middle Ages. The Church indeed rejected from her
authoritative teaching the Pantheism and Nihilism to which those
tenets lead if held consistently, and affirmed a personal triune God,
intelligent and free; a world created out of nothing and to return to
nothing; mankind redeemed from evil by one sole mediator; a future
life to be enjoyed without the sacrifice of the soul's individual nature.
But the Neoplatonists supplied illustration of church doctrine and
interpretation of Christian truth, and thinkers who saw danger in
anthropomorphism found support for their metaphysic in the heathen
school of Alexandria. The time is passed when men spoke of fourth
century Christianity as a mere copy of Neoplatonism, but the object
and principles of the two systems are so much alike that it is not
surprising to find points of close resemblance in their presentment.
The resemblance is most marked in the writings of the Greek and
Syrian fathers. The Eastern element in Neoplatonism could not but
37
C. MED. H. VOL. I. CH. XX.


## p. 578 (#608) ############################################

578
Neoplatonism. Synesius. Hilary
appeal to Eastern theologians; this appeal and its response explain the
large welcome extended to the works of two supposed disciples of
St Paul, “Hierotheus " and " Dionysius the Areopagite," whose rhapsodies
were received as Pauline truth not only by their credulous contemporaries
but by the mystics of the medieval Church. In these writings the
personal existence of God is threatened and the direct road to Him is
closed. “God is the Being of all that is. ” “The Absolute Good and
Beautiful is honoured by eliminating all qualities, and therefore the
non-existent must participate in the Good and Beautiful. ” God, who
can only be described by negatives, can only be reached by the surrender
of all personal distinctions and a voluntary descent into uncreated
nothingness. As has been well said, “ the name God” came to be little
more than the deification of the word “not. " All this is the language
of Brahmanism or Buddhism, and, but for the corrective influence of
Christian experience on the one hand and of Greek love of beauty on
the other, it would have led to Oriental apathy and hatred of the world
which God called good. The Cappadocian fathers— Basil and the two
Gregorys-who were Platonists at heart, and were driven, by the argument
that God being simple must be easily intelligible, to assert in strong
terms the essential mystery of the divine being, yet maintained that
imperfection does not render human knowledge untrue, and that
the wisdom displayed in the created universe enables the mind to grasp,
by analogy, the divine wisdom and the uncreated beauty. This habit
of tracing analogies between the seen and the unseen is characteristic of
Platonism, Christian or heathen, and, we may remark in passing, it bears
pleasant fruit in that love for natural beauty that marks the writings
of the Cappadocians.
The mind of Plotinus is seen still more clearly in Synesius of Cyrene
(A. D. 365-412), country gentleman, philosopher, and bishop, who was in
every sense a Neoplatonist first and a Christian afterwards. All his
serious thought is couched in the language of the schools, while his
hymns are merely metrical versions of Neoplatonist doctrine. When
he was chosen bishop he was reluctantly ready to give up his dogs-he
was a mighty hunter-but not his wife, nor his philosophy, although it
contained much that was opposed to current Christian teaching on such
important points as the end of the world and the resurrection of the
body. He probably represents the attitude of many at this transition
period, though few possessed his clearness of mind and boldness of speech.
The influence of Neoplatonism in the West is less marked, but it is
there. Hilary's curious psychology, according to which soul makes body,
is Plotinian, though he may have taken it from Origen ; and his own
sketch of his spiritual progress from the darkness of philosophy to the
light gives evidence that he first learnt from Neoplatonism the desire
for knowledge of God and union with Him (cf. de Trin. 1. 1–13).
Augustine was yet more deeply affected by “the philosophers,”
especially in his early works. It was Plato, interpreted by Plotinus,


## p. 579 (#609) ############################################

Neoplatonism and Augustine. The Antiochenes 579
whom he read in a Latin version, that, as he himself tells us, delivered
him from materialism and pantheism. Thus the ecstatic illumination
recorded in the Confessions (VII. 16, 23) was called forth by the perusal
of the Enneads and is indeed expressed in the very words of Plotinus.
Again, in more than one passage there is a distinct approach on his part
to the Plotinian Trinity (one, mind, soul), or at least a statement of the
Christian Trinity in terms of being, knowledge, and will, that seems to
go beyond the limits of mere illustration or analogy!
Again, Augustine accepts and repeats word for word the Neo-
platonic denial of the possibility of describing God. “God is not even
to be called ineffable, because to say this is to make an assertion about
Him” (de doctr. christ. 1. 6); but, like the Cappadocians, his feet are
kept from the hopeless via negativa by an intense personal conviction
of the abiding presence of God and by a real vision of the divine. His
mind and heart taught him the real distinction between the old
philosophy and the new religion, but all his deepest thoughts about
God and the world, freedom and evil, bear the impress of the books
which first impelled him “to enter into the inner chamber of his soul
and there behold the light. ” The appeal away from the illusion of
things seen to the reality that belongs to God alone, the slight store set
by him on institutions of time and place, in a word, the philosophic
idealism that underlies and colours all Augustine's utterance on
doctrinal and even practical questions and forms the real basis of his
thought, is Platonic. And, considering the vast effect of his mind and
writings on succeeding generations, it is no exaggeration to say with
Harnack that Neoplatonism influenced the West under the cloak of
church doctrine and through the medium of Augustine. Boethius, the
last of the Roman philosophers and the first scholastic, certainly imitated
Augustine's theology, and thought like him as a Neoplatonist. At
the same time it must be remembered that Platonism was the philosophy
that commended itself most naturally to Christian or
to
heathen thinkers. Aristotle had had no attraction for Plutarch,
while Macrobius deliberately set out to refute him. The influence
of Aristotle is certainly seen in the treatment of particular problems
by individual writers, but the only school that deliberately preferred
his method to his master's is that of Antioch. To the mystical
and intuitive movement of Alexandria the Antiochenes, especially
Diodorus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, opposed a rationalism and a
systematic treatment of theological questions which is obviously
Aristotelian.
But there were two articles of the old religion that went deeper and
spread further into the new than any philosophic method. These were,
first the mediators between God and man that were so prominent in Neo-
even
1 Cf. Conf. xi. 12; de Trin. xv. SS 17-20, 41.
CH. XX.
37-2


## p. 580 (#610) ############################################

580
Dæmonology and Divination
platonism, and secondly the magic that was its inseparable accompani-
ment.
It is mere futility to find a pagan source for every Christian saint
and festival, but a study of hagiographic literature reveals a very large
amount of heathen reminiscence, and even of formal adoption, in the
Church's Calendar. Doubtless there were other factors in the growth of
the cultus of the saints and their relics—human instinct, the Jewish
theory of merit, the veneration of confessors and martyrs, and the strong
confidence which from an early date was placed in the virtue of their
intercessions. But the extraordinary development of the cultus between
A. D. 325 and 450 can only be explained by the polytheistic or rather
the polydæmoniac tendencies of the mass of Gentile converts with the
memories of hero and dæmon worship in their minds. Again, Neo-
platonism involved the use of magic; the Christianity of the day
admitted belief in it; for while the Bible forbade the practice, it did
not deny its potency. Closely connected with magic stood divination,
whether by astrology and haruspication, or by dreams and oracles. The
Neoplatonists, following earlier thinkers, were committed to a theory
of inward illumination, and ascribed the various phenomena of divination
to the agency of spiritual forces working upon responsive souls. Christians
allowed the supernatural inspiration of pagan oracles but held that it
came, not from God like the inspiration of the Prophets, but from the
fellowship of wicked men with evil dæmons, of whose real existence they
had no manner of doubt. The fact that Scripture used the word datuóvlov
of an evil spirit was immediate evidence of his existence and his wicked-
ness. Philosophers might plead that there were beneficent dæmons.
Aaluóvlov had only one sense in the Bible, and that was enough to condemn
all that bear the name. The dæmons, in the worship of whom, as
Eusebius said, the whole religion of the heathen world consisted, were
the object of the Christian's deepest fear and hate as being the source
of all material and spiritual evil, and the avowed enemies of God. To
them were due all the errors and sins of men, all the cruelty of nature.
Wind and storm fulfilled God's word; but when mischief followed in
their train, it was the work of Satan and his angels. Intercourse with
these was stringently forbidden, but no one questioned its possibility.
Augustine records the various charms and rites by which dæmons can
be attracted; he was a firm believer in his mother's dreams and in her
power to distinguish between subjective impressions and heaven-sent
visions. And Synesius (writing, it is true, before his conversion) states his
conviction that divination is one of the best things practised among men.
Magic had been the object of penal legislation from the early days of the
Empire, but the very violence of the laws passed by Christian emperors
against it points to the prevalence of the belief in it, a belief which the
lawgiver shared with his subjects. Constantine and Theodosius may
have really looked to their anti-magical measures as a means to destroy
polytheism and purify the Church, but the former emperor expressly


## p. 581 (#611) ############################################

The authority of Scripture. Cosmogony
581
excluded from the scope of his edict rites whose object was to save
men from disease and the fields from harm, while his son Constantius,
and Valens and Valentinian, were persuaded that magic might be turned
against their life or power, and by way of self-defence fell to persecuting
the magicians as fiercely as their predecessors had persecuted the Church.
The title, “enemies of the human race,” formerly applied to Christians
was now transferred to the adepts in magical arts.
But present punishment and future warning were powerless to check
practices that were the natural results of all-prevailing credulity. What
this was in heathen circles may be learnt from the pages in which
Ammianus Marcellinus (A. D. 325–395) describes the Rome of his day;
“many who deny that there are powers supernal will not go abroad nor
breakfast nor bathe till they have consulted the calendar to find the
position of a planet. ” In Christian circles the credulity took also
another form, that of an easy belief in miracles, not only of serious
import such as the discovery of the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius
-which is still a problem to the historian-but trivialities such as the
winning of a horse race through the judicious use of holy water, the
gift of reading without letters, and all the marvels of the Thebaid. The
truth is that amid the universal ignorance of natural laws men were ready
to believe anything. And it must be confessed that what greatly
fostered credulity and error among educated Christians was the literal
interpretation of Scripture which held the field in spite of Alexandrian
allegorism. The scientific and the common sense of Augustine were alike
shocked by the interminable fables of the Manichaeans concerning sky
and stars, sun and moon; but it was their sacrilegious folly that finally
turned him from the sect. “The authority of Scripture is higher than
all the efforts of the human intelligence," he wrote, and the words
exactly express the mind of churchmen whenever there was a conflict
between physical theory and the faith. The erroneous speculations of
early philosophers, from whatever source derived, were taken up and
readily adopted, provided that they did not contradict the Bible.
There are already anticipations in the fourth century of the marvellous
scheme of Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth, whereof the chief features
were a two-storied firmament and a great northern mountain to hide
the sun by night-all duly supported by scriptural quotations. The
results to which Greek speculation had by a supreme intellectual effort
arrived were cast aside in favour of the wildest Eastern fancies, because
these latter had the apparent sanction of Genesis and the Psalms. The
heliocentric theory of the universe, which although not universally
admitted had at least been propounded and warmly supported, was
deliberately refused, first on the authority of Aristotle, and a system
adopted which led the world astray until Galileo. Genesis demanded
that the earth should be the centre, and the sun and stars lights for
man's convenience.
CH. XX.


## p. 582 (#612) ############################################

582
Antipodes.
Chronography. Eusebius
Again, the notion of a spherical earth was favoured in classical
antiquity even by geocentricians. But the words of Psalmist, Prophet,
and Apostle required a flat earth over which the heavens could be
stretched like a tent, and the believers in a globe with antipodes were
scouted with arguments borrowed from Lucretius the epicurean and
materialist. Augustine denies the possibility not of a rotund earth but
of human existence at the antipodes. “There was only one pair of
original ancestors, and it was inconceivable that such distant regions
should have been peopled by Adam's descendants. ” The logic is fair
enough; the false premiss arises from the worship of the letter. The
fact is that while as spiritual teachers the fathers are unrivalled, common
sense interpretation is rare enough in our period; it is not often that
we find such sober judgment as is shewn by Basil. “What is meant,"
he writes (Hom. in Ps. xxviii), “ by the voice of the Lord ? Are we to
understand thereby a disturbance caused in the air by the vocal organs ?
Is it not rather a lively image, a clear and sensible vision imprinted
on the mind of those to whom God wishes to communicate His thought,
a vision analogous to that which is imprinted on our mind when we
dream? "
In connexion with the unquestioning trust in the letter of Scripture
as the touch-stone for all matters of knowledge some mention must
be made of attempts to adjust universal history by the standard of
Biblical dates, although the results, in one instance at least, bear
witness to no uncritical credulity but to a singular freedom from
prejudice and to love of truth.
The science of comparative chronography, so greatly developed by
the Byzantines, was really founded by Sextus Julius Africanus in the
early third century. The beginning which he made was carried out
with far greater knowledge and with the use of much better material
by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (A. D. 265-338). Former critics were
inclined to belittle Eusebius' work and qualify him as a dishonest
writer who perverted chronology for the sake of making synchronisms
(so Niebuhr and Bunsen). It is certainly true that he manipulates
the figures supplied by his authorities and employs conjecture and
analogy to control the incredible length of their time-periods. But
his reductions are all worked in the sight of the reader, who if he
cannot allow the main contention, viz. the infallibility of the Biblical
numbers, must confess the honesty of the method and the soundness
of the process.
In dealing with Hebrew chronology Eusebius shews
candour and judgment. There was need of both, for even when the
discrepancies between the Hebrew and the LXX texts were removed
by claiming for the latter a higher inspiration, there remained contra-
dictions enough between the covers of the Greek Bible. For instance,
the time between the Exodus and Solomon's Temple is different in
Acts and Judges from what it is in Kings. On this point Eusebius,


## p. 583 (#613) ############################################

Chronography. Eusebius
583
after a fair and sensible discussion, decided boldly and to the dismay
of his contemporaries against St Paul in favour of the shorter period,
remarking that the Apostle's business was to teach the way of salvation
and not accurate chronology. The effect of this decision is to lessen
the antiquity of Moses by 283 years. This was clean against the whole
tendency of previous apologists, who desired to establish the seniority
of the Hebrew over all other lawgivers and philosophers. Eusebius,
although conscious that the reversal of preconceived opinion demands
some apology, is content to place Moses after Inachus. The work in
which these novel conclusions were set forth consists of two parts, of
which the first (Chronographia) contains the historical material-extracts
from profane and sacred writers—for the synthetic treatment of the
second part (Canones). Here the lists of the world's rulers are displayed
in parallel columns shewing at a glance with whom any given monarch
is contemporary. Side-notes accompany the lists, marking the main
events of history, and a separate column gives the years of the world's
age, reckoned from the birth of Abraham. The choice of this event as
the starting-point of the Synchronism distinguishes the work of Eusebius
from that of his predecessors and does great credit to his historical sense
and honesty. As a Christian he felt that his standard of measurement
must be the record of the scriptures; but as a historian he saw that
history really begins with Abraham, the earlier chapters of Genesis being
intended for edification rather than instruction. At a time when the
Jews were a despised race, it was no slight achievement to place their
history on a footing with that of proud and powerful monarchies,
and although Eusebius' work cannot at all points stand the test of
modern science, it is of permanent value to-day both as a source of
information and as a model of historical research.