We must now consider what was the thought of Jesus upon God and how he conceived of the relation between God and man. He approached the matter originally from the standpoint of Judaism, and no attempt to prove the influence of Greek philosophy is likely to succeed. The result of Greek speculation upon God—where it did not end in pure pantheism—was that of God nothing whatever could be predicated—not even being, but that he was to be expressed by the negation of every idea that could be formed of him. To this men had been led by their preconception of absolute being, and so strong was the influence of contemporary philosophy that Christian thinkers adopted the same conclusion, managing what clumsy combinations they could of it and of the doctrine of incarnation. Clement of Alexandria is a marked example of this method.
To the philosophic mind God remains a difficult problem, but to the religious temper things are very different. To it God is the one great reality never very far away, and is conceived not as an abstraction, nor as a force, but as a personality. It has been and is the strength and redemption of Judaism, that God is the God of Israel—"Oh God, thou art my God!" How intuition is to be reconciled with philosophy has been the problem of Christian thinkers in every age, but it may be remarked that the varying term is philosophy. To the intuition of Jesus Christians have held fast—though Greeks and others have called it "folly"; and in the meantime a good many philosophies have had their day.
The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of God. For this, as for much else, parallels have been found in the words of Hebrew thinkers, ancient and contemporary, and we may readily concede that it was not original with Jesus to call God Father. The name was given to God by the prophets, but it was also given to him by the Stoics—and by Homer; so that to speak of God's Fatherhood might mean anything between the two extremes of everything and nothing. Christian theology, for instance, starting with the idea of the Fatherhood of God, has not hesitated to speak in the same breath of his "vindicating his majesty"—a phrase which there is no record or suggestion that Jesus ever used. There may be fathers who vindicate their majesty, as there are many other kinds, but until we realize the connotation of the word for men who speak of God as Father, it is idle to speak of it being a thought common to them. The name may be in the Old Testament and in Homer, but the meaning which Jesus gave to it is his own.
Jesus 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 women had hid the leaven in the three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry. And as to clothes—God has clothed the flower far better than Solomon ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" 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. Jesus is greater than the men who have elaborated his ideas, and majesty is the foible of little minds. The great man, if he thinks of his dignity, lets it take care of itself; he is more interested in love and truth, and he forgets to think of what is due to himself. Aristotle said that his "magnificent man" would never run; but, says Jesus, when the prodigal son was yet a great way off, "his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." This contrast measures the distance between the thought of Jesus and some Christian theologies. It is worth noting that in the two parables, in which a father directly addresses his son, it is with the tender word téknon, which is more like a pet name. It adds to the meaning of the parable of the prodigal, when the father calls the elder brother by the little name that has come down from childhood. It was a word which Jesus himself used in speaking to his friends.[22] The heavenly Father does not cease to be a father because his children are ungracious and bad. He sends rain and sun—and all they mean—to evil and to good. The whole New Testament is tuned to the thought of Jesus—"the philanthropy of God our saviour."[23]
Plato had long before defined the object of human life as "becoming like to God." Jesus finds the means to this likeness to God in the simplest of every day's opportunities. "Love your enemies and do good, and ye shall be sons of the Highest, for he is good and pitiful." "Blessed are the peace-makers," he said, "for they shall be called children of God." This is sometimes limited to the reconciliation of quarrels, but the worst of quarrels is the rift in a man's own soul, the "division of his spiritual substance against itself" which is the essence of all tragedy. There are some whose least word, or whose momentary presence, can somehow make peace wherever they go, and leave men stronger for the rest they have found in another's soul. This, according to Jesus, is the family likeness by which God's children are recognized in all sorts of company. 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.
Jesus lays a good deal more stress upon unconscious instinct than most moralists do. Once only he is reported to have spoken of the Last Judgment, which was a favourite theme with the eschatologists of his period, Jewish, pagan, and Christian. He borrowed the whole framework of the scene, but he changed, and doubly changed, the significance of it. For he discarded the national or political criterion which the Jew preferred, and he did not have recourse to the rather individualistic moral test which Greek thinkers proposed, in imitation of Plato; still less did it occur to him to suggest a Credo. With him the ultimate standard was one of sheer kindness and good-heartedness—"inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren." But it is still more interesting to note how this standard is applied. Every one at the Last Judgment accepts it, just as every one accepts the propositions of moralists in general. But the real cleavage between the classes of men does not depend on morality, as the chilly suggestion of the mere word reminds us. Men judge other men not by their morality, professed or practised, so much as by their unconscious selves—by instinct, impulse and so forth, the things that really give a clue to the innermost man. The most noticeable point then in Jesus' picture of the Last Judgment is that, when "sheep" and "goats" are separated, neither party at once understands the reasons of the decision. These are conscious of duties done; the others have no very clear idea about it. Elsewhere Jesus suggests that, when men have done all required of them, they may still have the feeling that they are unprofitable servants; and it is precisely the peace-makers and the pure in heart who do not realize how near they come to God. The priest and the Levite in the parable were conscious of their purity, but Jesus gives no hint that they saw God. The Samaritan lived in another atmosphere, but it was natural to him and he breathed it unconsciously. The cultivation of likeness to God by Greek philosophers and their pupils was very different. Plutarch has left a tract, kindly and sensible, on "How a man may recognize his own progress in virtue," but there is no native Christian product of the kind.
The Kingdom of God
From what Jesus directly says of God, and from what he says of God's children, we may conclude that he classes God with the strong and sunny natures; with the people of bright eyes who see through things and into things, who have the feeling for reality, and love every aspect of the real. God has that sense which is peculiar to the creative mind—the keen joy in beauty, that loves star and bird and child. God has the father's instinct, a full understanding of human nature, and a heart open for the prodigal son, the publican and the woman with seven devils. "In his will is our peace," wrote the great Christian poet of the middle ages. "Doing the will we find rest," said a humble and forgotten Christian of the second century.[24] They both learnt the thought from Jesus, who set it in the prayer beginning with Abba which he taught his disciples, and who prayed it himself in the garden with the same Abba in his heart. "In the Lord's prayer," said Tertullian, "there is an epitome of the whole Gospel."[25]
At this point two questions rise, which are of some historical importance, and bear upon Jesus' view of God. It is clear, first of all, that the expression "the Kingdom of God" was much upon the lips of Jesus, at least in the earlier part of his ministry. It was not of his own coining, and scholars have differed as to what he really meant. Such controversy always rises about the terms in which a great mind expresses itself. The great thinker, even the statesman, has to use the best language he can find to convey his ideas, and if the ideas are new, the difficulty of expression is sometimes very great. The words imply one thing to the listener, and another to the speaker who is really trying (as Diogenes put it) to "re-mint the currency," and how far he succeeds depends mostly upon his personality. To-day "the Kingdom," or more accurately "the Kingship of God," is in some quarters interpreted rather vigorously in the sense which the ordinary Jew gave to the phrase in the age of Jesus; but it is more than usually unsound criticism to take the words of such a man as meaning merely what they would in the common talk of unreflective persons, who use words as counters and nothing else. There was a vulgar interpretation of the "Kingship of God," and there was a higher one, current among the better spirits; and it is only reasonable to interpret this phrase, or any other, in the light of the total mind of the man who uses it. It is clear then that, when Jesus used "the Kingship of God," he must have subordinated it to his general idea of God; and what that was, we have seen. To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that it was merged and lost in the idea of the church.
Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of God" is the name Messiah, with a similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and hardly a title at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos—terms which Jesus did not use—superseded the old Hebrew title, at any rate in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his master-thought of God's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a close relation to the purposes of God, and a mission to men, the stewardship of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with God. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from the devil, or from the justice of God, by the blood of a victim is still more alien to Jesus' mind.
The cross
These are some of the features of the founder of the new religion as revealed in the Gospels—features that permanently compel attention, but after all it was not the consideration of these that conquered the world. Of far more account in winning the world was the death of this man upon the cross. It was the cross that gave certainty to all that Jesus had taught about God. The church sturdily and indignantly repudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That he should taste the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the palliative wine and myrrh (an action symbolic of his whole attitude to everything and to death itself), 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 our reconciliation with God. If we may take an illustration from English literature, Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar may suggest something here. It has been noticed how small a part Cæsar plays in the drama—how little he speaks; what weakness he shows—epilepsy, deafness, arrogance, vacillation; and how soon he disappears. Would not the play have been better named Brutus? Yet Shakespeare knew what he was doing; for the whole play is Julius Cæsar, from the outbreak of Cassius at the beginning—
Why! man he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus,
to the bitter cry of Brutus at the end—
O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!
Cæsar determines everything in the story. Every character in it is a mirror in which we see some figure of him, and the life of every man there is made or unmade by his mind toward Cæsar. Cæsar is the one great determining factor in the story; living and dead, he is the centre and explanation of it all.
What was written in the Gospels of the life and death of Jesus, might by now be ancient history, if the Gospels had told the whole story. But they did not tell the whole story; and they neither were, nor are, the source of the Christian movement, great as their influence is and has been. The Jesus who has impressed himself upon mankind is not a character, however strong and beautiful, that is to be read about in a book. Before the Gospels were written, men spoke of the "Spirit of Jesus" as an active force amongst them. We may criticize their phrase and their psychology as we like, but they were speaking of something they knew, something they had seen and felt, and it is that "something" which changed the course of history. Jesus lives for us in the pages of the Gospels, but we are not his followers on that account, nor were the Christians of the first century. They, like ourselves, followed him under the irresistible attraction of his character repeating itself in the lives of men and women whom they knew. The Son of God, they said, revealed himself in men, and it was true. Of his immediate followers we know almost nothing, but it was they who passed him on to the next generation, consciously in their preaching, which was not always very good; and unconsciously in their lives, which he had transformed, and which had gained from him something of the power of his own life. The church was a nexus of quickened and redeemed personalities,—men and women in whom Christ lived. So Paul wrote of it. A century later another nameless Christian spoke of Christ being "new born every day over again in the hearts of believers," and it would be hard to correct the statement. If we are to give a true account of such men as Alexander and Cæsar, we consider them in the light of the centuries through which their ideas lived and worked. 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 the Gospels are not four but "ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands," and the last word of every one of them is "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."
Chapter IV Footnotes:
[1] Justin, Apology, i, 66.
[2] Quoted by Origen, contra Celsum, ii, 26, 27.
[3] Cf. Mr F. C. Conybeare's article on the remodelling of the baptismal formula in Matthew xxviii after the Council of Nicæa, Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1902.
[4] Origen, c. Cels. vii, 58, agroikóteron.
[5] Xen. Mem, i, 2, 37. Cf. Plato, Symp. 221 E. Gorgias, 491 A. See Forbes, Socrates, 128; Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, i, 338.
[6] Plato, Philebus, 50 B.
[7] On "playfulness" in the words of Jesus, see Burkitt, the Gospel History, p. 142. See also Life of Abp Temple, ii. 681 (letter to his son 18 Dec. 1896), on the "beam in the eye" and the "eye of the needle"—"that faint touch of fun which all Oriental teachers delight in."
[8] Luke iv, 22, ethaúmazon epì toîs lógois tês charitos.
[9] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, ad loc.
[10] Matthew xiii, 56 says pâsai, and Mark uses a plural.
[11] Luke xi, 5.
[12] Mark ix, 36, enagkalisámenos.
[13] Gospel History, p. 285.
[14] I believe that the allusion to dogs has been thrown back into Jesus' words from the woman's reply, and that she was the first to mention them. Note Mark's emphatic phrase dià toûton tòn lógon; vii, 29.
[15] Gospel History, p. 93 f. (with map).
[16] The steady gaze and the pause are mentioned by the Gospels, in more than one place, as preceding utterance. There are of course great variations in the accounts of the last supper.
[17] xxii, 28.
[18] The author of Rab and his Friends.
[19] ix, 36.
[20] Cf. ad Diognetum, cited on p. 177.
[21] I quote this from a friend to whom a Jew said as much; of course every general statement requires modification. Still the predominantly tribal character of Judaism implies contempt for the spiritual life of the Gentile Christian and pagan. If the knowledge of God was or is of value to the Jew, he has made little effort to share it.
[22] e.g. Mark x, 24.
[23] Titus iii, 4.
[24] Second Clement (so-called), 6, 7.
[25] Tert. de Or. 1 (end). Cf. also c. 4, on the prayer in the Garden; and de fuga, 8.
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. Everywhere there was a varnish of Greek literature; everywhere a tendency to uniformity in government, very carefully managed with great tenderness for local susceptibilities, but none the less a fixed object of the Emperors; everywhere cult was blended with cult with the lavish hospitality of polytheism; and yet, apart from denationalized men of letters, artists and dilettanti, the old types remained and reproduced themselves. And when men looked at the Christian community, it was as various as the Empire—"Thou wast slain," runs the hymn in the Apocalypse, "and thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation." There soon appeared that desire for uniformity which animated the secular government, and which appears to be an ineradicable instinct of the human mind. Yet for the first two centuries—the period under our discussion—the movement toward uniformity had not grown strong enough to overcome the race-marks and the place-marks. There are great areas over which in Christian life and thought 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, we do not know how. 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.[1]
Into all these great divisions of the world came men eager to tell "good news"—generally quite commonplace and unimportant people with a "treasure in earthen vessels." Their message they put in various ways, with the aphasia of ill-educated men, who have something to tell that is far too big for any words at their command. It was made out at last that they meant a new relation to God in virtue of Jesus Christ. From a philosophic point of view they talked "foolishness," and they lapsed now and then, under the pressure of what was within them, into inarticulate and unintelligible talk, from which they might emerge into utterance quite beyond their ordinary range. Such symptoms were familiar enough, but these people were not like the usual exponents of "theolepsy" and "enthusiasm." They were astonishingly upright, pure and honest; they were serious; and they had in themselves inexplicable reserves of moral force and a happiness far beyond anything that the world knew. They were men transfigured, as they owned. Some would confess to wasted and evil lives, but something had happened,[2] which they connected with Jesus or a holy spirit, but everything in the long run turned upon Jesus.
Clearer heads came about them, and then, as they put it, the holy spirit fell upon them also. These men of education and ideas were "converted," and began at once to analyse their experience, using naturally the language with which they were familiar. It was these men who gave the tone to the groups of believers in their various regions, and that tone varied with the colour of thought in which the more reflective converts had grown up. 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 unconquerable 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 unity of the early church lay in the reconciliation with God, in the holy spirit, and Jesus Christ,—a unity soon felt and treasured. "There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all."[3] The whole body of Christians was conscious of its unity, of its distinctness and its separation. It was a "peculiar people"[4]—God's own; a "third race," as the heathen said.[5]
The recruits
To go further into detail we may consider the recruits and their experience, their explanations of this experience, and the new life in the world.
The recruits came, as the Christians very soon saw, 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.
It was on Jewish ground that Christianity began, and it was from its native soil and air that it drew, transmuting as it drew them, its passionate faith in One God, its high moral standard and its lofty hopes of a Messianic age to come. For no other race of the Mediterranean world was the moral law based on the "categoric imperative." Nowhere else was that law written in the inward parts, in the very hearts of the people,[6] and nowhere was it observed so loyally. The absurdity and scrupulosity which the Greek ridiculed in the Jew, were the outcome of his devotion to the law of the Lord; and, when once the law was reinterpreted and taken to a higher plane by Jesus, the old passion turned naturally to the new morality. It was the Jew who brought to the common Christian stock the conception of Sin, and the significance of this is immense in the history of the religion. It differentiated Christianity from all the religious and philosophical systems of the ancient world.
'Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man's Heart.
Seneca and the Stoics played with the fancy of man's being equal, or in some points superior, 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. Nor is it only the Old Testament that the church owes to the Jew; for the Gospels are also his gift—anchors in the actual that have saved Christianity from all kinds of intellectual, spiritual and ecclesiastical perils. And, further, at the difficult moment of transition, when Christian ideas passed from the Jewish to the Gentile world, there were Jews of the Hellenistic type ready to mediate the change. They of all men stood most clearly at the universal point of view; they knew the grandeur and the weakness of the law; they understood at once the Jewish and the Greek mind. It is hard to exaggerate what Christianity owes to men of this school—to Paul and to "John," and to a host of others, Christian Jews of the Dispersion, students of Philo, and followers of Jesus. On Jewish soil the new faith died; it was transplantation alone that made Christianity possible; for it was the true outcome of the teaching of Jesus, that the new faith should be universal.
The chief contribution of the Greek was his demand for this very thing—that Christianity must be universal. He made no secret of his contempt for Judaism, and he was emphatic in insisting on a larger outlook than the Jewish. No man could seem more naturally unlikely to welcome the thoughts of Jesus than the "little Greek" (Graæculus) of the Roman world; yet he was won; and then by making it impossible for Christianity to remain an amalgam of the ideas of Jesus and of Jewish law, the Greek really secured the triumph of Jesus. He eliminated the tribal and the temporary in the Gospel as it came from purely Jewish teachers, and, with all his irregularities of conduct and his flightiness of thought, he nevertheless set Jesus before the world as the central figure of all history and of all existence.[7] Even the faults of the Greek have indirectly served the church; for the Gospels gained their place in men's minds and hearts, because they were the real refuge from the vagaries of Greek speculation, and offered the ultimate means of verifying every hypothesis. The historic Jesus is never of such consequence to us as when the great intellects tell us that the true and only heaven is Nephelococcygia. For Aristophanes was right—it was the real Paradise of the Greek mind. What relief the plain matter-of-fact Gospel must have brought men in a world, where nothing throve like these cities of the clouds, would be inconceivable, if we did not know its value still. While we recognize the real contribution of the Greek Christians, it is good to see what Christianity meant to men who were not Greeks.
Tatian
There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose attitude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian was "born in the land of the Assyrians."[8] He travelled widely in the Græco-Roman world,[9] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome—monuments of shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks, divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of future events, the excellence of the precepts and the subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (tò tôn hólôn monarchikón). My soul was taught of God, and I understood that while Greek literature (tà mèn) leads to condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten thousand tyrants."[10] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel among themselves,"[11] the philosophers with their long hair and long nails and vanity,[12] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (psychrología) I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy."[13] He made the first harmony of the Gospels—an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a world of literary affectations.
Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena—his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The burden of them all is that Jesus Christ truly suffered on the cross. Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews.—No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he truly suffered, he truly rose, ate and drank, and was no dæmon without a body (daimónion asómaton)—none of it is seeming, it is all truly, truly, truly.[14] He has been called hysterical, and his position might make any nervous man hysterical—death before him, his Lord's reality denied, and only time for one word—Truly. Before we pass him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to illustrate the deepest thought of himself and his age—"He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."[15]
The Roman came to the Church as he came to a new province. He gravely surveyed the situation, considered the existing arrangements, accepted them, drew up as it were a lex provinciæ to secure their proper administration, and thereafter interpreted it in accordance with the usual principles of Roman law, and, like the procurator in Achæa, left the Greeks to discuss any abstract propositions they pleased. Tertullian and Cyprian were lawyers, and gave Latin Christendom the language, in which in later days the relations of man with his Divine Sovereign were worked out by the great Latin Fathers.
Freedom from dæmons
The confession of Tatian, above cited, emphasizes as one of the great features of the barbarian literature—its "monarchic" teaching—"it sets man free from ten thousand tyrants"—and this may be our starting-point in considering the new experience. To be rid of the whole dæmon-world, to have left the dæmons behind and their "hatred of men,"[16] their astrology,[17] their immorality and cruelty, their sacrifices, and the terror of "possession" and theolepsy and enchantment,[18] was happiness in itself. "We are above fate," said Tatian, "and, instead of dæmons that deceive, we have learnt one master who deceiveth not."[19] "Christ," wrote an unknown Christian of a beautiful spirit—"Christ wished to save the perishing, and such mercy has he shown us that we the living do not serve dead gods, but through him we know the Father of truth."[20] "Orpheus sang to beguile men, but my Singer has come to end the tyranny of dæmons," said Clement.[21] The perils of "meats offered to idols" impressed some, who feared that by eating of them they would come under dæmoniac influence. With what relief they must have read Paul's free speech on the subject—"the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof"—"for us there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him."[22] "Even the very name of Jesus is terrible to the dæmons"[23]—the "name that is above every name." In no other name was there salvation from dæmons, for philosophy had made terms with them.
No one can read the Christian Apologists without remarking the stress which they lay upon the knowledge of God, which the new faith made the free and glad possession of the humblest. "They say of us that we babble nonsense among females, half-grown people, girls and old people. No! all our women are chaste and at their distaffs our maidens sing of things divine," said Tatian, and rejoined with observations on famous Greek women, Lais, Sappho and others. Justin, always kindlier, speaks of Socrates who urged men to seek God, yet owned that "it would be a hard task to find the father and maker of this All, and when one had found him, it would not be safe to declare him to all,"[24] but, he goes on, "our Christ did this by his power. No man ever believed Socrates so much as to die for his teaching. But Christ, who was known to Socrates in part, (for he was and is the Word that is in everything...)—on Christ, I say, not only philosophers and scholars (philólogoi) believed, but artisans, men quite without learning (idiôtai), and despised glory and fear and death." "There is not a Christian workman but finds out God and manifests him," said Tertullian.[25] This knowledge of God was not merely a desirable thing in theory, for it is clear that it was very earnestly sought. To Justin's quest for God, allusion has been made—"I hoped I should have the vision of God at once (katóphesthai)" he says. "Who among men had any knowledge of what God was, before he came?"[26] "This," wrote the fourth evangelist, "is eternal life—that they may know thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."
The holy spirit
But it is one thing to be a monotheist, and another to be a child of "Abba Father," and this is one of the notes of the early Christian. It is impossible to over-emphasize the significance of Christian happiness amid the strain and doubt of the early Empire. Zeno and Isis each had something to say, but who had such a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and of the love of God? "God is within you," said Seneca; but he knew nothing of such an experience as the Christian summed up as the "grace of God," "grace sufficient" and "grace abounding." It is hard to think of these familiar phrases being new and strange—the coining of Paul to express what no man had said before—and this at the moment when Seneca was writing his "moral letters" to Lucilius. Verbal coincidences may be found between Paul and Seneca, but they are essentially verbal. The Stoic Spermaticos Logos was a cold and uninspiring dogma compared with "Abba Father" and the Spirit of Jesus—it was not the same thing at all. The one doctrine made man self-sufficient—in the other, "our sufficiency (hikanótes) is of God." It was the law of nature, contrasted with the father of the prodigal son—"our kind and tender-hearted father" as Clement of Rome calls him [27]—the personal God, whose "problem is ever to save the flock of men; that is why the good God has sent the good shepherd."[28]
The more lettered of Christian writers like to quote Plato's saying that man was born to be at home with God (oikeíôs échein pròs theòn) and that he was "a heavenly plant." Falsehood, they say, and error obscured all this, but now "that ancient natural fellowship with heaven" has "leapt forth from the darkness and beams upon us."[29] "God," says Clement, "out of his great love for men, cleaves to man, and as when a little bird has fallen out of the nest, the mother-bird hovers over it, and if perchance some creeping beast open its mouth upon the little thing,
Wheeling o'er his head, with screams the dam
Bewails her darling brood;
so God the Father seeks his image, and heals the fall, and chases away the beast, and picks up the little one again."[30]
God has "anointed and sealed" his child and given him a pledge of the new relation—the holy spirit. This is distinctly said by St Paul,[31] and the variety of the phenomena, to which he refers, is a little curious. Several things are covered by the phrase, and are classed as manifestations with a common origin. There are many allusions to "speaking with tongues"; Paul, however, clearly shows that we are not to understand a miraculous gift in using actual languages, reduced to grammar and spoken by men, as the author of the Acts suggests with a possible reminiscence of a Jewish legend of the law-giving from Sinai. The "glossolaly" was inarticulate and unintelligible; it was a feature of Greek "mantic," an accompaniment of over-strained emotion, and even to be produced by material agencies, as Plutarch lets us see. Paul himself is emphatic upon its real irrelevance to the Christian's main concern, and he deprecates the attention paid to it. Other "spiritual" manifestations were visions and prophecies. With these Dr William James has dealt in his Varieties of Religious Experience, showing that in them, as in "conversion," there is nothing distinctively Christian. The content of the vision and the outcome of the conversion are the determining factors. Where men believe that an ordinary human being can be temporarily transformed by the presence within him of a spirit, the very belief produces its own evidence. If the tenet of the holy spirit rested on nothing else, it would have filled a smaller place in Christian thought.
Jesus the saviour
But when Paul speaks of the holy spirit whereby the Christians are sealed, calling it now the spirit of God and now the spirit of Jesus, he is referring to a profounder experience. Explain conversion as we may, the word represents a real thing. Men were changed, and were conscious of it. Old desires passed away and a new life began, in which passion took a new direction, finding its centre of warmth and light, not in morality, not in religion, but in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. "To me to live is Christ," cried Paul, giving words to the experience of countless others. Life had a new centre; and duty, pain and death were turned to gladness. The early Christian was conscious of a new spirit within him. It was by this spirit that they could cry "Abba, Father"; it was the spirit that guided them into all truth; it was the spirit that united them to God,[32] that set them free from the law of sin and death, that meant life and peace and joy and holiness. Paul trusted everything to what we might call the Christian instinct and what he called the holy spirit, and he was justified. No force in the world has done so much as this nameless thing that has controlled and guided and illumined—whatever we call it. Any one who has breathed the quiet air of a gathering of men and women consciously surrendered to the influence of Jesus Christ, with all its sobering effect, its consecration, its power and gladness, will know what Paul and his friends meant. It is hardly to be known otherwise. In our documents the spirit is closely associated with the gathering of the community in prayer.
Freedom from dæmons, forgiveness and reconciliation with God, gladness and moral strength and peace in the holy spirit—of such things the early Christians speak, and they associate them all invariably with one name, the living centre of all. "Jesus the beloved" is a phrase that lights up one of the dullest of early Christian pages.[33] "No! you do not so much as listen to anyone, if he speaks of anything but Jesus Christ in truth," says Ignatius.[34] "What can we give him in return? He gave us light ... he saved us when we were perishing ... We were lame in understanding, and worshipped stone and wood, the works of men. Our whole life was nothing but death.... He pitied us, he had compassion, he saved us, for he saw we had no hope of salvation except from him; he called us when we were not, and from not being he willed us to be."[35] "The blood of Jesus, shed for our salvation, has brought to all the world the grace of repentance."[36] "Ye see what is the pattern that has been given us; what should we do who by him have come under the yoke of his grace?"[37] "Let us be earnest to be imitators of the Lord."[38] These are a few words from Christians whose writings are not in the canon. Jesus is pre-eminently and always the Saviour; the author of the new life; the revealer of God; the bringer of immortality. It made an immense impression upon the ancient world to see the transformation of those whom it despised,—women, artisans, slaves and even slave-girls. 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—was a bantering improvisation by the people of Antioch, who were notorious in antiquity for impudent wit:[39] it was a happy shot and touched the very centre of the target. "The name" and "his name," are constantly recurring phrases. But it was not only that men would die for the name—men will die for anything that touches their imagination or their sympathy—but they lived for it and showed themselves to be indeed a "new creation." "Our Jesus"[40] was the author of a new life, and a very different one from that of Hellenistic cities. 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, 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 laid in the rock against which the floods of theory might beat in vain. For now we have to consider another side of early Christian activity—the explanation of the new experience.
The early Christian community found "the unexamined life" as impossible as Plato had, and they framed all sorts of theories to account for the change in themselves. Of most immediate interest are the accounts which they give of the holy spirit and of Jesus. Here we must remember that in all definition we try to express the less known through the more known, and that the early Christians necessarily used the best language available to them, and tried to communicate a new series of experiences by means of the terms and preconceptions of the thinking world of their day—terms and preconceptions long since obsolete.
Much in the early centuries of our era is unintelligible until we form some notion of the current belief in spiritual beings, evidence of which is found in abundance in the literature of the day, pagan and Christian. A growing consensus among philosophers made God more and more remote, and emphasized the necessity for intermediaries. We have seen how Plutarch pronounced for the delegation of rule over the universe and its functions to ministering spirits. The Jews had a parallel belief in angels, and had come to think of God's spirit and God's intelligence as somehow detachable from his being. In abstract thought this may be possible just as we think of an angle without reference to matter. The great weakness in the speculation of the early Empire was this habit of supposing that men can be as certain of their deductions as of their premisses; and God's Logos, being conceivable, passed into common religious thought as a separate and proven existence.
The holy spirit
At the same time there was abundant evidence of devil-possession as there is in China to-day. Modern medicine distinguishes four classes of cases which the ancients (and their modern followers) group under this one head:—Insanity, Epilepsy, Hysteria major and the mystical state. To men who had no knowledge of modern medicine and its distinctions, the evidence of the "possessed" was enough, and it was apt to be quite clear and emphatic as it is in such cases to-day. The man said he "had a devil"—or even a "legion of devils." The priestess at the oracle said that a god was within her (éntheos). In both cases the ocular evidence was enough to convince the onlookers of the truth of the explanation, for the persons concerned were clearly changed and were not themselves.[41] Plato played with the idea that poetry even might be, as poets said, a matter of inspiration. The poet could not be merely himself when he wrote or sang words of such transforming power. The Jews gave a similar account of prophecy—the Spirit of the Lord descended upon men, as we read in the Old Testament. The Spirit, says Athenagoras to the Greeks, used the Hebrew prophets, as a flute-player does a flute, while they were in ecstasy (kat ékstasin)[42]—the holy spirit, he adds, is an effluence (apórroia) of God.[43]
The Christians, finding ecstasy, prophecy, trance, and glossolaly among their own members, and having before them the parallel of Greek priestesses and Hebrew prophets, and making moreover the same very slight distinction as their pagan neighbours between matter and spirit, and, finally, possessing all the readiness of unscientific people in propounding theories,—they assumed an "effluence" from God, a spirit which entered into a man, just as in ordinary life evil demons did, but here it was a holy spirit. This they connected with God after the manner familiar to Jewish thinkers, and following the same lead, began to equate it with God, as a separate being. It is not at first always quite clear whether it is the spirit of God or of Jesus—or even a manifestation of the risen Jesus.[44]
When we pass 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—Christians would have nothing to do with a Jesus who was an emanation from an absolute and inconceivable Being, a Jesus who in that case would be virtually indistinguishable from Asclepios the kindly-natured divine healer. Nor would they tolerate the notion of a phantom-Jesus crucified in show, while the divine Christ was far away—like Helen in Euripides' play.[45] "Spare," says Tertullian, "the one hope of all the world."[46] They would not have a "daimonion without a body." 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.
Paul
The one theory is especially Paul's—sacred to all who lean with him to the Hebrew view of things, to all who, like him, are touched with the sense of sin and feel the need of another's righteousness, to all who have come under the spell of the one great writer of the first century. A Jew, a native of a Hellenistic city—and "no mean one"[47]—a citizen of the Roman Empire, a man of wide outlooks, with a gift for experience, he passed from Pharisaism to Christ. The mediating idea was righteousness. He knew his own guilt before God, and found that by going about to establish his own righteousness he was achieving nothing.
At the same time a suffering Messiah was a contradiction in terms, unspeakably repulsive to a Jew. We can see this much in the tremendous efforts of the Apologists to overcome Jewish aversion by producing Old Testament prophecies that Christ was to suffer. Pathetós (subject to suffering) was a word that waked rage and contempt in every one, who held to contemporary views of God, or even had dabbled in Stoic or similar conceptions of human greatness. 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—along familiar lines—that Christ's sufferings might be for the benefit of others. And then he saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. What exactly happened is a matter of discussion, but Paul was satisfied—he was "a man in Christ."
Much might be said in criticism of Paul's Christology—if it were not for Paul and his followers. They have done too much and been too much for it to be possible to dissect their great conception in cold blood. Paul's theories are truer than another man's experiences—they pulse with life, they have (in Luther's phrase) hands and feet to carry a man away. The man is so large and so strong, so simple and true, so various in his knowledge of the world, so tender in his feeling for men—"all things to all men"—such a master of language, so sympathetic and so open—he is irresistible. The quick movement of his thought, his sudden flashes of anger and of tenderness, his apostrophes, his ejaculations—one feels that pen and paper never got such a man written down before or since. Every sentence comes charged with the whole man—half a dozen Greek words, and not always the best Greek—and the Christian world for ever will sum up its deepest experience in "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."
Close examination reveals a good deal of Judaism surviving in Paul,—a curious way of playing with the text of Scripture, odd reminiscences of old methods, and deeper infiltrations of a Jewish thought which is not that of Jesus. Yet it does not affect our feeling for him—he stands too close to us as a man, too much over us as the teacher of Augustine, Calvin and Luther—a man, whom it took more genius to explain than the church had for fifteen centuries, and yet the man to whom the church owes its universal reach and unity, its theology and the best of the language in which it has expressed its love for his master.
Explanation of Jesus
Paul went back to the Jewish conception of a Messiah, modified, in the real spirit of Jesus, by the thought of suffering. But when we put side by side the Messiah of Jesus and the Messiah of Paul, we become conscious of a difference. The latter is a mediator between God and man, making atonement, transferring righteousness by a sort of legal fiction, and implying a conception of God's fatherhood far below that taught by Jesus. At the same time Paul has other thoughts of a profounder and more permanent value. It is hard, for instance, to imagine that any change, which time and thought may bring, can alter a word in his statement that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself"—here there is no local or temporal element even in the wording. It may be noted that Paul has his own names for Jesus, for while he uses "Messiah" (in Greek) and "Son of God," he is the first to speak of "the Lord" and "the Saviour." Paul held the door open for the other great theory of the early church, when he emphasized the pre-existence of the heavenly Christ and made him the beginning, the centre and the end of all history.
The Logos, as we have seen, was not an original idea of the Christian world. It was long familiar to Greek philosophy, and Philo and the Stoics base much of their thought upon it. It must have come into the church from a Greek or Hellenistic source, perhaps as a translation of Paul's "heavenly Christ." As it stands, it is a peculiarly bold annexation from Philosophy. No Stoic would have denied that the Spermaticos Logos was in Jesus, but the bold identification of the Logos with Jesus must have been "foolishness to the Greek." Still in contemporary thought there was much to dispose men to believe in such an incarnation of the Logos in a human being, though there is no suggestion that a spiritual being of any at all commensurate greatness was ever so incarnated before. But the thought appealed to the Christian mind, when once the shock to Greek susceptibilities was overcome. Once accepted, it "solved all questions in the earth and out of it." It permitted the congenial idea of Greek theology to remain—the transcendence of God being saved by this personification of his Thought. It was a final blow to all theories that made Jesus an emanation, a phantom or a demi-god, and it kept his historic personality well in the centre of thought, though leaving it now comparatively much less significance.
Surveying the two accounts, Jewish and Greek, we cannot help remarking that they belong to other ages of thought than our own. Columbus, Copernicus and Darwin were neither philosophers nor theologians, but they have changed the perspectives of philosophy and theology, and we think to-day with a totally different series of preconceptions from those of Jew and Greek of the first century. The Greek himself never thought much of the "chosen race," and it was only when he realized that Jesus was not a tribal hero, that he accepted him. To the Greek the Messiah was as strange a thought as to ourselves. To us the Logos is as strange as the Messiah was to the Greek. We have really at present no terms in which to express what we feel to be the permanent significance of Jesus, and the old expressions may repel us until we realize, first, that they are not of the original essence of the Gospel, and second, that they represent the best language which Greek and Jew could find for a conviction which we share—that Jesus of Nazareth does stand in the centre of human history, that he has brought God and man into a new relation, that he is the personal concern of everyone of us, and that there is more in him than we have yet accounted for.
Into the question of the organization adopted by the early Christians and the development of the idea of the church, it is not essential to our present purpose to inquire. Opinion varies as to how far we should seek the origin of the church in the teaching and work of Jesus. If his mind has been at all rightly represented in this book, it seems to follow that he was not 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. 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 series of running fights with Greek speculation in the second century contributed to the natural and acquired instincts for order and system,—particularly in a world where such instincts had little opportunity of exercise in municipal, and less in political, life. The name was, as Harnack says, a masterly stroke—the "ecclesia of God" suggested to the Greek the noble and free life of a self-governing organism such as the ancient world had known, but raised to a higher plane and transfigured from a Periclean Athens to a Heavenly Jerusalem. Fine conceptions and high ideals clung about the idea of the church in the best minds,[48] but in practice it meant the transformation of the gospel into a code, the repression of liberty of thought, and the final extinction of prophecy. For the view that every one of these results was desirable, reason might be shown in the vagaries of life and speculation which the age knew, but it was obviously a departure from the ideas of Jesus.
The new life
The rise of the church was accompanied by the rise of mysteries. There is a growing consensus of opinion among independent scholars 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 (phárkmakon athanasías) and the antidote that we should not die"—the former phrase reappearing in Clement of Alexandria.[49] 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. It was from such a world and such societies that most of the converts came and brought with them the thoughts and instincts of countless generations, who had never conceived of a religion without rites and mysteries. Baptism similarly took on a miraculous colour—men were baptized for the dead in Paul's time—and before long it bore the names familiarly given by the world to all such rituals of admission—enlightenment (phôtismós) and initiation; and with the names came many added symbolic practices in its administration. The Christians readily recognized the parallel between their rites and those of the heathen, but no one seems to have perceived the real connexion between them. Quite naïvely they suggest the exact opposite—it was the dæmons, who foresaw what the Christian rites (hierá) would be, and forestalled them with all sorts of pagan parodies.[50]
But, after all, the force of the Christian movement lay neither in church, nor in sacrament, but in men. "How did Christianity rise and spread among men?" asks Carlyle, "was it by institutions, and establishments, and well arranged systems of mechanism? No! ... It arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul; and was spread by the 'preaching of the word,' by simple, altogether natural and individual efforts; and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated by it. Here was no Mechanism; man's highest attainment was accomplished Dynamically, not Mechanically."[51] Nothing could be more just. The Gospel set fire to men's hearts, and they needed to do nothing but live to spread their faith. The ancient evidence is abundant for this. The Christian had an "insatiable passion for doing good"[52]—not as yet a technical term—and he "did good" in the simplest kind of ways. "Even those things which you do after the flesh are spiritual," says Ignatius himself, "for you do all things in Jesus Christ."[53] "Christians," says a writer whose name is lost, "are not distinguishable from the rest of mankind in land or speech or customs. They inhabit no special cities of their own, nor do they use any different form of speech, nor do they cultivate any out-of-the-way life.... But while they live in Greek and barbarian cities as their lot may be cast, and follow local customs in dress and food and life generally, ... yet they live in their own countries as sojourners only; they take part in everything as citizens and submit to everything as strangers. Every strange land is native to them, and every native land is strange. They marry and have children like everyone else—but they do not expose their children. They have meals in common, but not wives. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They continue on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the laws ordained, and by their private lives they overcome the laws.... In a word, what the soul is in the body, that is what Christians are in the world."[54]
"As a rule," wrote Galen, "men need to be educated in parables. Just as in our day we see those who are called Christians[55] have gained their faith from parables. Yet they sometimes act exactly as true philosophers would. That they despise death is a fact we all have before our eyes; and by some impulse of modesty they abstain from sexual intercourse—some among them, men and women, have done so all their lives. And some, in ruling and controlling themselves, and in their keen passion for virtue, have gone so far that real philosophers could not excel them."[56] So wrote a great heathen, and Celsus admits as much himself. In life at least, if not in theory, the Christians daily kept to the teaching of their Master. "Which is ampler?" asks Tertullian, "to say, Thou shalt not kill; or to teach, Be not even angry? Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or to bid refrain from a single lustful look?"[57] There was as yet no flight from the world, though Christians had no illusions about it or about the devil who played so large a part in its affairs. They lived in an age that saw Antinous deified.[58] They stood for marriage and family life, while all around "holy" men felt there was an unclean and dæmonic element in marriage.[59] One Christian writer even speaks of women being saved by child-bearing.[60] Social conditions they accepted—even slavery among them—but they brought a new spirit into all; love and the sense of brotherhood could transform every thing. Slavery continued, but the word "slave" is not found in Christian catacombs.[61]