NEOPLATONISM IN RELATION TO CHRISTIANITY

 

 I

ROMAN RELIGION IN THE THIRD CENTURY

 

The period in which Neo-Platonism takes its rise is essentially an age of transition. Lying as it does between the age of pure Graeco-Roman paganism and the final triumph of Christianity, it is the period in which both of the opposing forces are making their preparations for the last great struggle. Paganism arms itself with the new philosophy and summons to its aid all the forces of Roman conservatism; whilst Christianity, which has already in great measure secured its hold on the masses now attacks the highest circles of society, and endeavors to satisfy the craving for a true system of religious philosophy.

But before entering upon a detailed discussion of the religion of the Roman Empire in the third century, we may by way of introduction take a passing glance at the picture which Lucian gives of Roman society and religion in the earlier part of the second. Shallow and heartless as he is, he nevertheless occupies a position of his own. When considering the evidence of the Christian apologists we are sometimes tempted to think that it must be prejudiced. The writers are carrying on a controversy against a system for which they feel that they have something better to substitute, and whose weak points they are bound, in spite of themselves, to exaggerate. They are liable to persecution, and therefore they may tend to overestimate their own simple faith and purity in contrast with the unbelief and licentiousness of the pagan world around them. But Lucian's position is different. He feels no fear of persecution. He has no special wish to regenerate or to reform mankind. He is a satirist, who writes in order to amuse himself by showing his utter contempt for the dead system that claimed to be the religion of the Empire.

This contempt is of course most openly expressed in such works as the Juppiter Tragoedus and the Dialogues of the Gods. But even if we leave these satirical works on one side, we still find in Lucian the clearest evidence of the low state into which religion had fallen. The memoir of Alexander the False Prophet and the account of the Death of Peregrinus are documents of considerable historical value; and in these we see, on the one hand the love of notoriety for which Peregrinus is ready to pay the price even of self-immolation; and, on the other, the blind credulity on which Alexander is able to work by the crudest of methods—a credulity which is not limited to the ignorant peasants of Asia Minor, but extends to the highest circles of Roman society. And in both works alike we see the love of sensation which has taken the place of the old Roman reverence for religion.

It is a matter for regret that Lucian has not given us a more complete account of the Christians of his day. The Church was passing through a great crisis: she had to face the question whether she was to remain a small society of religious devotees, or to go forward and take her place at the head of the great religions of the world. The Montanists preferred to remain where they were: the Church as a whole decided to go forward. At such a time the evidence of a writer like Lucian would have been of peculiar interest. But he passes over Christianity almost in silence. In his authentic works there are perhaps not more than two direct references to it. He tells us that Alexander was wont, at the commencement of his "Mysteries" to cry "If any Atheist or Christian or Epicurean have come to spy upon the Ceremonies, let him flee". And it is to be remembered that Alexander would be no mean judge of the audience best suited for his purpose, so that his warning cry suggests that the Christians at this time were not all such simple and credulous folk as we are sometimes inclined to suppose. The other reference to Christianity occurs in the account of Peregrinus. In his younger days this person had professed himself a Christian, and Lucian describes with mingled admiration and contempt the way in which his fellow-Christians tended him during an imprisonment for the sake of the faith. This is the passage that gives us the clearest view of Lucian's own ideas upon the subject of Christianity. It is too much to say with Suidas that he is a blasphemer; for that charge can only be made good by reference to the pseudo-Lucianic Philopatris. In the account of Peregrinus, the reference to "their crucified sophist" expresses rather pity for Christian credulity than downright contempt.

Such are the only direct references to Christianity which are to be found in Lucian's writings. It is clear that the subject had but little interest for him. It failed to excite his curiosity, and he practically ignores it.

With regard however to the condition of pagan thought in his day, Lucian is a most valuable witness. He is a man of considerable ability, at once thoroughly versatile and thoroughly skeptical, whilst his detached attitude lends especial weight to his opinions. The impression that we gain from a study of his writings is that there was no central force in paganism at this time: the old powers were found to be effete, or, at the best, to be spasmodic and local in their effects, and it seemed as though the whole system were crumbling away through sheer inability to survive.

But it must not be assumed that this would be equally true as a description of the religion of the Empire half a century later. In the period between Lucian and Plotinus there occurred an extraordinary revival or recrudescence of paganism. This was not merely a revival of external ceremonial, such as took place in the time of Augustus. It was a genuine reformation, and it led to the growth of a more spiritual religion than the Roman world had ever known.

Of this revival of paganism no contemporary historian has left us a complete account. Indirect evidence however is not wanting. It is to be derived in abundance from sources at once numerous and varied. Much can be gathered from heathen writers,—from historians like Dio Cassius and Lampridius, from philosophers like Porphyry, and from sophists like Philostratus. Further contributions may be levied from Christian writers, from Clement of Alexandria and Origen, from Tertullian and Augustine. Nor must the evidence of inscriptions be neglected, which is invaluable, in this as in other cases, as affording contemporary corroboration to the statements of our other authorities.

The characteristic note of Roman society at this period was its cosmopolitanism. More than one generation had passed away since Juvenal uttered his lament that the Orontes was emptying itself into the Tiber, and no attempt had been made to check the stream of foreign immigration. The aristocracy of the second century, liberal and progressive as it had been in matters of legislation, had been comparatively conservative in matters of religion. But the end of that century witnessed a change. The religious revival of this period affected all classes of pagan society, and the enthusiasm which it aroused was expended as much in the welcoming of new divinities as in the service of the old ones.

The mere number of gods and goddesses who succeeded in obtaining recognition in the Empire at this time is astounding. It is impossible within the limits of the present chapter to do more than mention the principal classes into which they fall, and to touch upon one or two of the most important of the deities. The old Roman gods were still the official guardians of the state. Their temples continued to stand in unimpaired splendour; they themselves still received sacrifices on all important occasions; and the office of Pontifex Maximus was still conferred upon each successive Emperor. The old colleges of priests, augurs, and the like, still existed, and member­ship in them was an honor that was much sought after; whilst the various guilds and societies for purposes of trade or of mutual benefit all had their religious aspects.

Of the cults which became prevalent after the fall of the Republic, the most widespread was the worship of the Emperor. As a general rule the Romans did not attempt to impose the worship of their gods upon conquered peoples, but in this particular case they made an exception. The worship of the Emperor was enforced in order to add to the stability of the Empire, by causing men's religious emotions to be centred on the man in whom the executive power was vested, and thus to efface those rivalries between the various towns and tribes which tended to foster a local and national rather than an imperial patriotism. As each town was merged in the vast Empire, the importance of local politics and local religion tended to decline, and the place of the local deity was taken by the Genius of the Empire, worshipped in concrete form in the person of the Emperor.

To the student of Church History this cult is of the greatest importance. Its enforced observance formed, in times of persecution, the dividing line between Christian and Pagan, and refusal to sacrifice to the Emperor was regarded as a species of treason. For the purposes of this essay its chief importance lies in the fact that it is one of the signs that the general drift of paganism tended towards some form of monotheism. The office, rather than the person of the reigning Emperor, was the real object of worship: and the many inscriptions extant in honour of the Wisdom, Justice or Clemency of the Emperor show how completely he had come to be regarded as a secondary providence, visible, accessible, and on earth; a divinity so near at hand that, according to Tertullian, men were more ready to perjure themselves by all the gods than by the Genius of the Emperor. At the same time, the apotheosis of departed Emperors did not tend to raise the tone of heathenism. Rather it served to diminish the value of deity and to place an efficient weapon in the hands of those who wished to bring discredit upon paganism.

The reigning Emperor was usually worshipped, not in person, but through the medium of his Genius. But the possession of a Genius was not the prerogative of the Emperor alone. There was a special Genius for every man, every family, every nation; we even find them assigned to the gods. Their worship was a survival from the primitive Roman religion which recognised a special deity for every single department of life: but the current ideas about the precise nature of Genii had been considerably modified by the Greek notions about daemons, and it would seem that in the third century there was a considerable variety in the opinions prevalent upon the subject. They were regarded, sometimes as immanent in the persons or things to which they were attached, sometimes as entirely external: some Genii were almost on a level with the gods, others again were but little higher in the scale of being than their charges. The Genius of each individual corresponds closely to the Christian conception of a guardian angel; as compared with the gods he resembles the family doctor, who watches over the wellbeing of his charges on all ordinary occasions, whilst they are the specialists, one or another of whom is summoned in cases of emergency.

Similar to the Genii were a number of personifications of abstract qualities to whom worship was offered. Such were Honos, Spes, Libertas, Virtus: the object worshipped being in each case the Genius of the quality named. How far these were mere abstractions, and to what extent they were regarded as actual deities, the worshipper himself would probably have found it hard to explain.

The belief in Genii was not merely a vulgar superstition. The philosophers recognised a world of spirits intermediate between gods and men: beings whom Celsus describes as the proconsuls or satraps of the gods, and whom Plotinus defines as eternal like the gods, but participating in the material world like men. There is also, in the writings of the Christian Fathers, ample evidence of a firm belief in angelic powers: and, more than this, the Fathers do not throw any doubt upon either the existence or the potency of the spirits worshipped by the pagans. They differ from heathen writers only in maintaining that these particular spirits are invariably evil.

The foregoing deities, however orientalised their worship may have become, were at least Roman in origin. But the greater part of the conglomeration of creeds, which formed the religion of the Empire, was derived from foreign sources. Egypt and Carthage, Phrygia and Syria, all sent their respective contingents to the Roman pantheon: even the wild German tribes were not unrepresented. It was the necessary result of the mixed character of the population. Eastern slaves carried with them superstitions from the East: merchants of Alexandria brought with them Egyptian gods as well as their wares; above all, the soldiers, recruited mainly from the frontiers of the Empire, carried their own deities and their own forms of worship wherever they went. Sooner or later the strange gods drifted to Rome, and, once planted, their worship was bound to spread. The mere novelty of these foreign cults made them objects of curiosity: the penal enactments, which still existed though never enforced, against those who encouraged strange rites, may have served to give them the added attractiveness of forbidden fruit; whilst they received a further impetus from the fact that many of them possessed special orders of priests whose sole business lay in the propagation of their religion. But the true cause of their success lay in the inability of the old Roman religion to satisfy the spiritual longings of the people. The old worship had served so long as Rome was struggling for bare existence; but even before the beginning of the Empire there were signs of the prevalence of a profound sense of religious discontent. Something less barren, less utterly unspiritual, was required, and any cult that claimed to supply this need was sure to be welcomed.

Foremost among the Eastern divinities, which came crowding into all parts of the Empire, stands the Egyptian Isis. Temples and statues without number were erected in her honour: the Emperors themselves took part in her processions. She was originally the personification of the female element in nature, but as time went on she assumed the attributes of several Greek and Roman goddesses—Juno, Ceres, Proserpine and Venus—and became moreover the patroness of shipping and commerce. She possessed not only an elaborate priesthood, but a lower order of mendicant brethren; and the magnificent ritual in her temples, alike in the daily worship and on the occasion of great festivals, cannot but have had its effect on the popular mind.

The other chief Egyptian deities were Osiris, the dog-headed Anubis, and Serapis, who afterwards gained greater popularity even than Isis. In the time of the Syrian Emperors, and in particular under Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Alexander Severus, these Egyptian divinities were in high favour.

It is impossible here to discuss in detail the systems that were introduced from Phrygia, Syria and Phoenicia. There was a certain similarity, alike in organization and in ritual, between all these Eastern religions. They usually had an order of priests: often also an order of mendicant friars, whose sole claim to sanctity seems, in some cases, to have consisted in their profession of poverty. Their ritual was characterized by the prevalence of "mysteries" and by elaborate ceremonial, every detail of which had its allegorical meaning. But they drew their supporters from a lower stratum of society than that with which we are concerned. They could not claim the immemorial antiquity of the Egyptian cults, and there was moreover about them a certain lack of refinement, which could not but be distasteful to the philosophical mind. They were tolerated, as meeting the religious needs of those to whom they appealed; but they failed to secure the respect and adherence of men of culture.

There remains however one deity who must not be passed over1. This is Mithras, the one Persian divinity who acquired a hold on the Roman Empire. We first hear of his being brought to Rome in connexion with Pompey's suppression of the Cilician pirates; but his worship attracted but little attention in the West until the middle of the second century of the Christian era. Then the Oriental tendency, discernible at Rome under the Antonines, brought him into favour: Antoninus Pius built a temple in his honour at Ostia, and Marcus Aurelius built another on the Vatican. At this period he is mentioned, with disdain it is true, but none the less with obvious apprehension in Lucian's Council of the Gods. Under the Severi his popularity grew by leaps and bounds, and it looked as though in another generation he would reign supreme.

To the Roman, Mithras was essentially the Sun-god of purity and power, able and willing to protect his worshippers in this world and the next. He was regarded as the creator of the world, the deliverer from cold and darkness. To many of his worshippers the moral and mystical teaching was of far greater importance than the doctrine of Mithras as the ruler of the physical world. His mysteries dealt probably for the most part with the future destiny of the soul, of which he is regarded as the saviour and regenerator. In the Mithraic catacomb on the Appian Way the course of the soul after death is described: we see it escorted by Mercury before Pluto and Proserpine, in the presence of the Fates, and finally conducted to the banquet of the just.

Mithras-worship has been described as the pagan form of Gnosticism. In both alike may be traced the love of mystical speculation; the growth of the idea of redemption; the belief that proper ritual could atone for a life of evil. It is interesting to notice that a worshipper could make atonement without himself undergoing the strain and discomfort of the ritual. For instance, the most striking of all the rites of Mithras was the Taurobolium, or baptism of blood. This ceremony, whereby the worshipper was drenched with the warm blood that flowed from the victim's throat, was supposed to bring certain regeneration. And it is to be remarked that it could be performed on a priest for the benefit of some other person. The'stress was laid on the opus operatum of the magical sacrament, not on the bodily presence of the individual for whose benefit it was offered.

We cannot here discuss the relation of Mithras-worship to Christianity. The early Christians were well aware of the similarity between the rites of Mithras and those of the Church. Actual connexion however there appears not to have been, though Justin Martyr and Tertullian denounce the washing of neophytes, the confirmation of the initiated, and the consecration of bread and water, as diabolical parodies of Christian sacraments.

The worship of Mithras spread rapidly, and at one time bid fair to become the final religion of the Empire. The high morality that it inculcated, and the almost military discipline that it maintained in its vast body of devotees seemed to give a promise of permanence which the other pagan systems could not offer. But it was not to be. After the time of Julian, Christianity took its place as the dominant religion of the West; and in later days Mahommedanism drove out Mithras-worship from its last strongholds in the Eastern Empire.

Such are a few of the main types of religion prevalent in the Roman Empire during the third century. No attempt has been made to give a complete catalogue of the gods who received worship at this period: whole classes have been omitted altogether, and no class has been described in its entirety. But the sketch, fragmentary as it is, may help to make clear the kind of religion which many of the Neoplatonists felt themselves called upon to defend. Its most striking characteristic is perhaps toleration. Never in the history of Western civilization have so many deities been recognised at the same time. And, paradoxical as it may appear, the general result of this excessive polytheism was to cause a strong current of feeling towards monotheism. Each deity was regarded as one particular form of "the Divine," and this idea received confirmation from the partial identity of the symbols and attributes ascribed to different gods.

This is the method by which the philosophers reconcile themselves to polytheism. "There is one sun and one sky over all nations" says Plutarch, "and one deity under many names." Even Celsus recognises one deity alone, but he recommends every nation to maintain its own cults, and so to honour the sovereign by showing respect to his representative. The personality of the various gods is thus more or less passed over. They are, in fact, gods from the point of view of religion, abstractions from that of philosophy. And a judicious use of the allegorical method of interpretation made it a comparatively simple matter to reconcile monotheism in theory with polytheism in practice. It may be well to add a few words with regard to what has been said about the attitude of the philosophers, and in particular, of the Neoplatonists, towards pagan polytheism.

It is true that the philosopher, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with systems of religion. His speculations may take a theological form, and he may even lay down general principles as to the means whereby man may hope to live in harmony with the Deity: but with the outward forms of religion he has no connection. Moreover, in considering the Neoplatonists we are tempted to imagine that the whole school shared the lofty position of Plotinus, and to forget that, until after the time of Julian, no other Neoplatonic writer, confined himself to the discussion of abstract philosophy, or failed to make it clear that he wished definitely to support the pagan system. How far Plotinus had in view the defence of paganism, is a question which will be discussed later: at all events his contemporaries and his immediate followers were all tinged with Neopythagoreanism, and hardly deserve, in its highest sense, the title of Philosophers. They professed to be rationalists who by specious explanation could justify the existence of superstitious observances, but the true state of the case would seem rather to be that they were carried away by the spirit of the age, and used their rationalism to condone their own superstition.

The great defect in the religious revival of the third century was its utter lack of the spirit of criticism. It is true that this uncritical spirit was not limited to that particular age, nor was it found among the heathen alone. Thus Tacitus among men of an earlier generation, and Clement of Rome and Tertullian among the Christians, were as ready to accept the legend of the Phoenix as Celsus or Philostratus. But in the third century the tide of ill-regulated religious feeling produced a flood of superstition against which men of the keenest intellect found it well nigh impossible to stand. It is hard, on any other supposition, to explain how so many of the great Neoplatonists could become upholders of astrology and magic, and declare that these things had a scientific basis in the influence of the stars and the mutual relations of the elements.

The whole machinery of augury, prophecy, oracles and the like was once again called into play, and all classes of society had recourse to one or other of these sources for aid and information upon every conceivable subject. But the most important of these means of communication with the unseen world were the various "Mysteries." The existence of such rites was not a new thing. The Eleusinian Mysteries had already been long established in the days of Plato, and the mysteries of the third century belong to the same general type. The number of deities however in whose honour they were celebrated, the high value set upon initiation, and the crowds of persons who were initiated, often into the mysteries of more than one deity, far surpassed anything that had been known before.

There is in fact a fundamental difference between the early Roman conception of religion and that of the period with which we are now concerned. The old Roman religion was barren and cold. The stress was laid on formal observances, the whole matter being neither more nor less than a bargain. In return for the proper sacrifices paid at the proper time and in the proper manner the gods were expected to send certain advantages to the worshipper. But by the beginning of the third century there had sprung up a real love for the gods, and a desire for communion with them. The belief also in a future life was far more definite than it had been in the Classical period. The philosophers on the one hand, and the hierophants of the various mysteries on the other, endeavoured to set men's minds at rest upon this matter, and both alike commanded the attention of those whom they addressed. There arose moreover an idea of holiness which had been practically unknown before; and with it an idea not unlike the Christian conception of sin. It is not the same, for there is no notion of man's voluntary deviation from the will of God. But there is the longing for the attainment of a state of purity, whether by a life of asceticism or by a series of purifying ceremonies.

One other question remains to be discussed. What was the attitude of the paganism of this period towards Christianity? Toleration has already been mentioned as the leading characteristic of the age, and it is in consequence not surprising to find that, under the Syrian Emperors, the Church was more free from persecution than at any other time between the reigns of Nero and Constantine. But it was difficult to extend toleration to a religion that was itself intolerant; and, side by side with the readiness to abstain from persecution, there are here and there traces of an almost pathetic anxiety that the Christians should do their share, and acknowledge that the older religions, if not actually superior, were at least on the same level as their own, and worthy of the fullest recognition as partial manifestations of the same deity.

The attitude however of the Church was not conciliatory. Never perhaps has there been a writer so uncompromising as Tertullian, and even if, a generation later, Origen appears to be in sympathy with much of heathen philosophy, there is no question as to his position with regard to heathen religion. Accordingly attempts were made to weld the pagan systems into a single weapon, which could be used with effect against the new religion.

The first of these attempts was made during the supremacy of Julia Domna. During the reigns of her husband, Septimius Severus, and of his successor Caracalla, this remarkable woman exercised an influence that was considerable even in matters of politics, whilst in the realm of art and literature her power was unquestioned. She gathered around her a literary circle of the best intellects of the age, recruited from all parts of the Empire, but principally from Greece and her native Syria. The tone of her coterie seems to have been brilliant and witty rather than scholarly; the members were men of the type that feeds on the love of the marvellous, but they were deficient in the patience needful for deep thought, and they lacked the courage fully to face the real problems of life. Their philosophy was Neopythagorean, their religion vague and comprehensive. They hated irreligion, and loved variety, and they were moreover capable of professing doctrines of high purity whilst leading a life of considerable self-indulgence.

Their great contribution to the defence of paganism was the life of Apollonius of Tyana, which was composed at the suggestion of the Empress, written in the first instance by Damis, and afterwards re­written and transformed by Philostratus. The subject of this biography was a real man, who lived at about the date to which he is here assigned, and in whose life occurred many of the principal episodes here described. But the whole has been so interwoven with legend and fiction that it is well nigh impossible to disentangle the true from the false. The philosopher of Tyana is in fact transformed into the patron saint, as it were, of third-century paganism, and the picture presented to us does not so much represent what Apollonius actually was, as what Philostratus would have liked him to be.

On the precise relation between the work of Philostratus and the Christian Gospels something will be said later: for the present it is sufficient to observe that the life and character of Apollonius, as here described, so far expressed the ideals of the age for which the book was written, that from being considered a mere provincial magician or charlatan, Apollonius suddenly came to be revered by the whole of pagan society as one who stood on a level with the noblest spirits of the ancient world. Caracalla built a temple in his honour: Alexander Severus assigned him a niche in his private chapel, side by side with Orpheus and Alexander the Great; and later still Eunapius revered him as something more than man. He is more than the prophet of paganism: he is the incarnation of its highest hopes and aims.

But, as time went on, it became clear that the effort had failed. The composite picture of Alexander constructed by the sophists of the third century was no more able to hold its own against the Christ of the Gospels than the disjointed forces of paganism to prevail against the united strength of the organized Church, and the heathen revival served only to pave the way for the coming of the new religion which its promoters were endeavouring to check.

Two other attempts may be mentioned, both of which illustrate the desire for recognition from the Christians to which allusion has already been made. The first of these need not long detain us: it was thoroughly distasteful to many of the people, and its chief interest lies in the indication which it gives of the trend of pagan thought towards monotheism. The Emperor Elagabalus was taken from the temple at Emesa to be placed on the throne against his will. He evinced no care whatever for the concerns of the Empire except in the sphere of religion, and here his sole object was the glorification of the god of Emesa. He endeavoured to make the worship of this deity the one religion of the Empire, by associating with El-Gabal the symbols and functions of all the other gods, and he expressed a hope that even Jews and Christians might be persuaded to worship the supreme God in the temple of El-Gabal. But his avowed contempt for all things Roman made his action odious to the upper classes: it never really affected the mass of the people, and its effects disappeared immediately after his death.

Elagabalus was succeeded by his cousin Alexander Severus, a man of very different type, whose natural temperament and education alike tended to give him the fullest sympathy with the old Roman spirit. He enjoyed intellectual society and showed the greatest reverence for the old gods, paying weekly visits to the temples on the Capitol. In his own private chapel he worshipped a curious assemblage of famous men. The niches were filled with statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus and Alexander the Great; whilst a lower order of heroes was also represented which included the names of Vergil and Cicero. Alexander clearly hoped to solve the problem of paganism by a religious eclecticism; calling into existence a hierarchy of the saints of all the religions with which he was acquainted. He is perhaps the noblest instance of the wide tolerance towards which the comprehensive religion of his time tended, but there was a certain lack of cohesion about his schemes, alike in religion and politics, which prevented them from exercising any lasting influence.