It might safely have been inferred, but it is a matter of proved fact, that while the higher intellectual life was thus being paralysed, the primary intellectual virtues were attained. As formerly in Jewry, so now in Christendom, the practice of pious fraud became normal: all early Christian literature, and most of the ecclesiastical history of many succeeding centuries, is profoundly compromised by the habitual resort to fiction, forgery, and interpolation. The mystical poetry of the pagans, the Jewish history of Josephus, the gospels, the Epistles, all were interpolated in the same spirit as had inspired the production of new Gospels, new Epistles, new books of Acts, new Sibylline verses. And even where to this tendency there was opposed the growing demand of the organized Church for a faithful text, when the documents had become comparatively ancient, the disposition to invent and suppress, to reason crookedly, to delude and mislead, was normal among churchmen. This is the verdict of orthodox ecclesiastical history, a dozen times repeated.132 It of course carries no surprise for those who have noted the religious doctrine of Plato, of Polybius, of Cicero, of Varro, of Strabo, of Dio Cassius.
While intelligence thus retrograded under the reign of faith, it is impossible to maintain, in the name of historical science, the conventional claim that the faith wrought a countervailing good. What moral betterment there was in the decaying Roman world was a matter of the transformed social conditions, and belongs at least as much to paganism as to Christianity: even the asceticism of the latter, which in reality had no reformative virtue for society at large, was a pre-Christian as well as an anti-Christian phenomenon. It is indeed probable that in the times of persecution the Christian community would be limited to the more serious and devoted types133—that is to say, to those who would tend to live worthily under any creed. But that the normal Christian community was superior in point of morals is a poetic hallucination, set up by the legends concerning the martyrs and by the vauntings of the Fathers, which are demonstrably untrustworthy. The assertion, still at times made by professed Positivists, that the discredit of the marriage tie in Roman life necessitated a new religion, and that the new religion was regenerative, is only a quasi-scientific variation of the legend.
The evidence as to the failure of the faith to reform its adherents is continuous from the first generation onwards. “Paul” complains bitterly of the sexual licence among his first Corinthian converts (1 Cor. v, 1, 2), and seeks to check it by vehement commands, some mystical (id. v. 5), some prescribing ostracism (vv. 9–13)—a plain confession of failure, and a complete reversal of the prescription in the gospel (Mt. xviii, 22). If that could be set aside, the command as to divorce could be likewise. Justin Martyr (Dial. with Trypho, ch. 141) describes the orthodox Jews of his day as of all men the most given to polygamy and arbitrary divorce. (Cp. Deut. xxiv, 1; Edersheim, History, p. 294.) Then the Christian assumption as to Roman degeneration and Eastern virtue cannot be sustained.
At the beginning of the third century we have the decisive evidence of Tertullian that many of the charges of immorality made by serious pagans against Christians were in large part true. First he affirms (Ad Nationes, l. i, c. 5) that the pagan charges are not true of all, “not even of the greatest part of us.” In regard to the charge of incest (c. 16), instead of denying it as the earlier apologist Minucius Felix had done in the age of persecution, he merely argues that the same offence occurs through ignorance among the pagans. The chapter concludes by virtually admitting the charge with regard to misconduct in “the mysteries.” Still later, when he has turned Montanist, Tertullian explicitly charges his former associates with sexual licence (De Jejuniis, cc. 1, 17: De Virginibus Velandis, c. 14), pointing now to the heathen as showing more regard for monogamy than do the Christians (De Exhort. Castitatis, c. 13).
From the fourth century onward the history of the Church reveals at every step a conformity on the part of its members to average pagan practice. The third canon of the Nicene Council forbids clerics of all ranks from keeping as companions or housekeepers women who are not their close blood relations. In the fifth century Salvian denounces the Christians alike of Gaul and Africa as being boundlessly licentious in comparison with the Arian barbarians (De Gubernatione Dei, lib. 5, 6, 7). They do not even, he declares, deny the charge, contenting themselves with claiming superior orthodoxy. (Cp. Bury, Hist. of the Later Roman Empire, i, 198–99, and Finlay, ii, 219, for another point of view.) On all hands heresy was reckoned the one deadly sin (Gieseler, § 74, p. 295, and refs.), and all real misdeeds came to seem venial by comparison. As to sexual vice and crime among the Christianized Germans, see Gieseler, § 125, vol. ii, 158–60.
In the East the conditions were the same. The story of the indecent performances of Theodora on the stage (Gibbon, ch. xl), probably untrue of her, implies that such practices openly occurred. Milman (Hist. of Chr. bk. iv, ch. ii. ed. cited, ii, 327) recognizes general indecency, and notes that Zosimus charged it on Christian rule. Salvian speaks of unlimited obscenity in the theatres of Christian Gaul (De Gub. Dei, l. 6). Cp. Gibbon as to the character of the devout Justinian’s minister Trebonian; who, however, was called an atheist. (Suidas, s.v.) On the collapse of the iconoclastic movement, licence became general (Finlay, Hist. of Greece, ed. Tozer, ii, 162). But even in the fourth century Chrysostom’s writings testify to the normality of all the vices, as well as the superstitions, that Christianity is supposed to have banished; the churches figuring, like the ancient temples, as places of assignation. (Cp. the extracts of Lavollée, Les Mœurs Byzantines, in Essais de littérature et d’histoire, 1891, pp. 48–62, 89; the S.P.C.K.’s St. Chrysostom’s Picture of his Age, 1875, pp. 6, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102–104, 108, 194; Chrysostom’s Homilies, Eng. tr. 1839, Hom. xii on 1st Cor. pp. 159–64; Jerome, Adv. Vigilantium, cited by Gieseler, ii, 66, note 19, and in Gilly’s Vigilantius and his Times, 1844, pp. 406–407.) The clergy were among the most licentious of all, and Chrysostom had repeatedly to preach against them (Lavollée, ch. iv; Mosheim, as last cited; Gibbon, ch. xlvii, Bohn ed. iv, 232). The position of women was practically what it had been in post-Alexandrian Greece and Asia-Minor (Lavollée, ch. v; cp. St. Chrysostom’s Picture of his Age, pp. 180–82); and the practice corresponded. In short, the supposition that the population of Constantinople as we see it under Justinian, or that of Alexandria in the same age, could have been morally austere, is fantastic.
It would indeed be unintelligible that intellectual decline without change of social system should put morals on a sound footing. The very asceticism which seeks to mortify the body is an avowal of the vice from which it recoils, and insofar as this has prevailed under Christianity it has specifically hindered general temperance,134 inasmuch as the types capable of self-rule thus leave no offspring.
On the other hand, with the single exception of the case of the gladiatorial combats (which had been denounced in the first century by the pagan Seneca,135 and in the fourth by the pagan Libanius, but lasted in Rome long after Christianity had become the State religion;136 while the no less cruel combats of men with wild beasts were suppressed only when the finances of the falling Empire could no longer maintain them),137 the vice of cruelty seems to have been in no serious degree cast out.138 Cruelty to slaves was certainly not less than in the Rome of the Antonines; and Chrysostom139 denounces just such atrocities by cruel mistresses as had been described by Horace and Juvenal. The story of the slaying of Hypatia, indeed, is decisive as to Christian ferocity.140
In fine, the entire history of Christian Egypt, Asia, and Africa, progressively decadent till their easy conquest by the Saracens, and the entire history of the Christian Byzantine empire, at best stagnant in mental and material life during the thousand years of its existence, serve conclusively to establish the principle that in the absence of freethought no civilization can progress. More completely than any of the ancient civilizations to which they succeeded, they cast out or were denuded of the spirit of free reason. The result was strictly congruous. The process, of course, was one of socio-political causation throughout; and the rule of dogma was a symptom or effect of the process, not the extraneous cause. But that is only the clinching of the sociological lesson.
Of a deep significance, in view of the total historical movement, is the philosophical teaching of the last member of the ancient Roman world who exhibited philosophical capacity—the long famous Boethius, minister of the conqueror Theodoric, who put him to death in the year 525. Ostensibly from the same hand we have the De Consolatione Philosophiae, which is substantially non-Christian, and a number of treatises expounding orthodox Christian dogma. In the former “we find him in strenuous opposition ... to the Christian theory of creation; and his Dualism is at least as apparent as Plato’s. We find him coquetting with the anti-Christian doctrine of the immortality of the world, and assuming a position with regard to sin which is ultra-Pelagian and utterly untenable by a Christian theologian. We find him, with death before his eyes, deriving consolation not from any hopes of a resurrection ... but from the present contempt of all earthly pain and ill which his divine mistress, ‘the perfect solace of wearied souls,’ has taught him.”141 Seeing that Theodoric, though a professed admirer of the ancient life, had absolutely put down, on pain of death,142 every remaining religious practice of paganism, it is certain that Boethius must have officially professed Christianity; but his book seems to make it certain that he was not a believer. The only theory on which the expounder of such an essentially pagan philosophy can be conceived as really the author of the Christian tractates ascribed to Boethius is that, under the stroke of undeserved ruin and unjust doom, the thinker turned away from the creed of his official life and sought healing in the wisdom of the older world.143 Whether we accept this solution or, in despite of the specific testimony, reject the theological tractates as falsely ascribed—either by their writer or by others—to Boethius,144 the significant fact remains that it was not the Christian tracts but the pagan Consolation that passed down to the western nations of the Middle Ages as the last great intellectual legacy from the ancient world. It had its virtue for an age of mental bondage, because it preserved some pulse of the spirit of free thought.